Seki, from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)"
- Date:
- c. 1806
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print; chuban
Seki, from the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi), is a small [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) print designed by Katsushika Hokusai around 1801. The Seki station, located in present-day Mie Prefecture, was historically an important checkpoint on the great highway, and Hokusai's sheet uses the location to register the practical character of a post-town defined by official functions and steady travel. Figures move through the foreground in compact groupings, station buildings cluster along the road, and the surrounding terrain opens enough to anchor the place geographically. The print's modest sheet size and restrained palette belong to the early-nineteenth-century print culture in which compact Tokaido sets circulated for Edo readers curious about the road between the shogun's capital and Kyoto. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, the design illustrates Katsushika Hokusai's structural attentiveness to how a station could be summarized through its essential features, an attentiveness that would inform his later, more elaborate landscape series. The impression is preserved in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. For collectors and students of ukiyo-e print history, Hokusai's Seki offers a useful early example of how the artist approached stations defined by their administrative role, demonstrating the careful observational habits that underlie his mature landscape practice and his lasting interest in the relationship between travelers, architecture, and the long road that joined east and west Japan.
1821
Color woodblock print with metallic pigments; surimono shikishiban
1822
Color woodblock print; shikishiban, surimono
1822
Color woodblock print; shikishiban, surimono
c. 1832
Color woodblock print; oban
Wakasa Kugushiko
1920
Color woodblock print; oban
Woodblock print
1934
Color woodblock print; oban
n.d.
Woodblock print; ishizuri-e, section of harimaze sheet
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
Seki, from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)" was created by Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾北斎) in c. 1806.
Yes — Seki, from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)" is part of the Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido series by Katsushika Hokusai.
Seki, from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)" depicts landscapes and tōkaidō.