Hodogaya

Hodogaya is an oban color woodblock print by Utagawa Yoshiiku, dated 1865, depicting the post-station of Hodogaya on the Tōkaidō, the great highway between Edo and Kyoto, as it appeared in the closing years of the Tokugawa period. The print belongs to one of several Tōkaidō series by senior Kuniyoshi pupils published in the early 1860s, in which the fifty-three stations of the road were re-imagined for a contemporary audience in compositions distinct from those of Hiroshige's mid-Edo series. Yoshiiku's Hodogaya combines the topographic conventions of the Tōkaidō print — clearly identifiable station landmarks, travelers along the road — with the Utagawa-school taste for animated genre figures absorbed from his master Kuniyoshi. The Metropolitan Museum's impression (JP3197) is part of the H. O. Havemeyer bequest of 1929 and is one of the standard reference impressions of the design. As an example of Yoshiiku's late bakumatsu landscape work, the print sits alongside his more famous Yokohama-e of the early 1860s and complements his actor and Yokohama production with evidence of his fluency in the older Hiroshige-Kuniyoshi landscape tradition.