Daimyō and his Retinue Crossing a Stream in Plain Near Fuji

Now in the Cleveland Museum of Art with a catalog year of 1753 that almost certainly reflects a chronological anomaly given Kitagawa Utamaro's career dates of roughly 1753 to 1806, this print depicts a daimyo and his retinue crossing a stream in plain near Fuji. The subject sits within the long tradition of meisho-e (famous-place pictures) and sankin-kotai imagery, capturing the spectacle of feudal lords and their attendants moving along the Tokaido under the political requirement that obliged them to alternate residence between their domains and Edo. Mount Fuji in the distance grounds the scene in a familiar landscape iconography that ukiyo-e would explore exhaustively in the nineteenth century. Even though Utamaro is most famous for Edo bijin-ga, his oeuvre includes excursions into landscape, procession, and historical genre, and an image of this kind broadens our understanding of his range within ukiyo-e. The Cleveland Museum of Art's holdings of Japanese woodblock prints include numerous Utamaro sheets across multiple genres, and this print contributes to that comprehensive picture of his work. Whether read as a study in the social hierarchy of the Edo period or as a more general image of a procession before Fuji, the composition reminds us that even an artist most celebrated for women within the Yoshiwara understood the wider visual culture that ukiyo-e served.