Wide View of Both Banks of the Sumida River, Edo

Wide View of Both Banks of the Sumida River, Edo, produced around 1804, is one of Katsushika Hokusai's expansive landscape compositions of the city's principal waterway. The Sumida River was Edo's vital artery for trade, fishing, leisure and ceremonial display, and Hokusai uses a long horizontal format to record the activity along its banks. Bridges, warehouses, pleasure boats, ferries and pilgrims are gathered into a unified panorama that anticipates the great urban landscape designs of his later career. As a ukiyo-e print, the composition demonstrates Hokusai's mastery of one-point and multi-point perspective absorbed from imported European prints, which he combined with the traditional bird's-eye conventions of Japanese landscape painting. The Harvard Art Museums preserve an impression of the design, and their wider holdings of Edo ukiyo-e support comparison with related Sumida views by other contemporary artists. The image is a primary visual document of the early nineteenth-century city, recording specific landmarks such as the Ryogoku Bridge and the Mimeguri Shrine. Hokusai's interest in the working river also speaks to a broader sensibility within Edo ukiyo-e in which urban landscape becomes a worthy subject in its own right. The print thereby occupies an important place in the prehistory of the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji and other mature landscape series.