Moonlight on the Yodo River (Yodogawa), from the series "Snow, Moon and Flowers (Setsugekka)"

Moonlight on the Yodo River, from the series Snow, Moon and Flowers, is one of Katsushika Hokusai's most lyrical late landscape designs, made around 1828. The Setsugekka series gathers three views around the classical poetic triad of snow, moon, and flowers, with each print pairing one of these natural motifs with a famous Japanese river. In Moonlight on the Yodo River, a low, broad boat carrying travelers and lit lanterns glides under a luminous moon, the steady current of the Yodo River reflecting the soft light. Hokusai uses imported Prussian blue across both sky and water, layering subtle gradations to evoke the calm of a moonlit evening. The boat is rendered with characteristic clarity, the lanterns hanging like small fires, the passengers carefully observed, and the surrounding landscape suggested with restrained washes. The design combines the meisho-e tradition of celebrating famous waterways with the classical poetic ideal of the moon-viewing scene, showing how Katsushika Hokusai could fuse landscape, genre, and literary allusion. As an ukiyo-e print, the work belongs to his most refined late Edo ukiyo-e output. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this impression as part of its broad Hokusai collection, documenting the Setsugekka series and its place within his exploration of poetry and landscape in the late 1820s.