Number 11 of the Bridge Series

Number 11 of the Bridge Series is a landscape ukiyo-e print designed by Katsushika Hokusai and held in the Harvard Art Museums. The sheet belongs to Hokusai's series Remarkable Views of Bridges in Various Provinces (Shokoku meikyō kiran), one of the great late-career landscape projects in which the artist turned the resources of Edo ukiyo-e toward the distinctive bridges that anchored the topography and travel infrastructure of Edo-period Japan.

The Shokoku meikyō kiran sequence comprises a small group of designs, each devoted to a particular bridge famous for its engineering, scenic setting, or literary associations. Hokusai treats each crossing as both topographical fact and pictorial structure, exploiting the bridge's span to organize the entire composition. Some designs reach across the picture plane in long horizontal sweeps; others arc upward into curving silhouettes against river and sky; still others, as in the famous Suspension Bridge between Hida and Etchū Provinces, dramatize precarious mountain crossings strung from cliff to cliff.

Formally the prints in the series demonstrate Hokusai's mature command of aerial perspective and atmospheric distance. Prussian blue dominates the palette, layered through skies, water, and shaded hillsides, while warmer browns and tans pick out the timber and stone of the bridges themselves. Bokashi shading along horizon lines and water surfaces lends each sheet a sense of light and depth distinctive to late Edo ukiyo-e.

As a ukiyo-e print, this Bridge Series design exemplifies the way Katsushika Hokusai turned vernacular engineering into a landscape subject worthy of treatment alongside Mount Fuji and the great waterfalls. The series remains one of the most admired landscape projects produced in Edo ukiyo-e during the 1830s.