Forty-Eight Famous Views of Tokyo: Evening View of Nihonbashi Bridge

This evening view of Nihonbashi Bridge belongs to the 'Forty-Eight Famous Views of Tokyo' series that Shōsai Ikkei produced around 1871 and is the unofficial opening sheet of the sequence. Nihonbashi — the wooden bridge from which all distances on the Five Highways of Tokugawa Japan had been measured for two and a half centuries — remained at the start of the Meiji era the symbolic center of the renamed capital, and Ikkei renders it here at dusk with the lanterns of the surrounding fish and produce markets being lit. The composition organizes the bridge diagonally across the lower register, with crowds of merchants, porters, and travelers compressed into a dense band of figures whose silhouettes register against the still-bright sky and the distant slope of Mount Fuji at the right margin. The pinks and synthetic reds in the lanterns and kimono are the imported aniline pigments that came to dominate ukiyo-e color in the 1860s and 1870s and that give Ikkei's series its characteristic high-pitched, somewhat saturated chromatic key. The print belongs to the Edo-Tokyo Museum's holdings of the series and is one of the principal documents of the Meiji-era Nihonbashi commercial district immediately before it was rebuilt in stone in 1911.