A Bridge in a Snowy Landscape, from the series "A Collection of Japanese and Chinese Poems for Recitation (Wakan roeishu)"

A Bridge in a Snowy Landscape is a vertical landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige issued in 1837 as part of the series A Collection of Japanese and Chinese Poems for Recitation (Wakan roeishu). The Art Institute of Chicago holds the sheet (object 36315). The Wakan roeishu was a classical Heian anthology of Chinese and Japanese poetic excerpts, and the Edo ukiyo-e series built around it paired well-known poems with Hiroshige's designs to evoke their imagery. In this composition, a wooden bridge spans a frozen watercourse beneath drifts of new snow, with bare-branched trees and a low rise of hills closing the background. Hiroshige is sparing with color, letting the unprinted whites of the paper carry most of the snowfall while small accents of indigo, gray, and warm sienna give the structure of bridge and shoreline. The vertical format, less common in his early landscape work, lets him stack the elements of the scene from foreground bridge to distant horizon and emphasizes the descent of snow through the air. As Edo ukiyo-e the print belongs to a flourishing of literary-pictorial editions in the 1830s, when publishers worked with leading designers to attach images to celebrated verse. For collectors interested in Hiroshige's winter and snow scenes, the Wakan roeishu sheets are a quieter alternative to his famous travel views, more concerned with mood and seasonal feeling than with topographical specificity.