Ancient Story of the Old Man Who Made the Trees Blossom

Utagawa Hiroshige's 1853 print Ancient Story of the Old Man Who Made the Trees Blossom illustrates one of Japan's best-loved folktales, the story of Hanasaka Jisan. According to the tale, a kindly old man, helped by a spirit-dog and the ashes of a magical mortar, scattered powder over withered cherry trees and made them bloom out of season; a greedy neighbor who tried to imitate him was punished by the same magic. Hiroshige depicts the climactic moment when the old man, perched on the branches of a great tree, releases a cloud of ash above an audience of mounted samurai and onlookers below, while the cherry trees burst into full pink blossom against a sky modulated by bokashi gradation. Although Hiroshige is best remembered for Edo ukiyo-e landscape print designs, narrative and legendary subjects formed an important secondary thread in his oeuvre, and he treats this folktale with the same attention to setting, costume, and atmospheric effect that he brought to his meisho. The composition uses the verticality of the tree to organize the action, contrasting the still, hierarchical audience with the explosive blossoming overhead. This impression is preserved in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, where it documents the breadth of Hiroshige's subject matter and the way late-Edo ukiyo-e operated as a medium for circulating and visualizing the shared narrative imagination of Japanese popular culture.