Asakusa River, Great Riverbank, Miyato River (Asakusagawa Okawabata Miyatogawa), from the series "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei)"

Issued in 1857 within Utagawa Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei), this landscape print depicts the broad sweep of the Sumida River where it was known by the local names Asakusagawa, Okawabata, and Miyatogawa. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the design among its extensive Hiroshige collection. Working at the height of his mature Edo ukiyo-e style, Hiroshige composed the scene in the dramatic vertical format that distinguishes the Hyakkei series, dividing the sheet into a near foreground of riverbank life and a luminous expanse of water and sky beyond. He typically placed boats, trees, or willows in close-up against the picture plane, allowing the viewer to read the river as both an intimate edge and a continental distance. The Sumida was central to the commercial and recreational life of Edo, carrying rice barges, ferries, and pleasure craft past the warehouses lining Okawabata and the temple precincts of Asakusa to the north. Hiroshige's restrained palette, anchored by indigo blues and warm earth tones with bokashi shading at the horizon, conveys the particular humidity and light of the lower city. The series, published by Uoya Eikichi, was issued in installments and became one of the most influential picture cycles of the late Edo period. Its compositional inventions, particularly the foregrounded vertical motifs against deep recession, were studied closely by European artists in the following decades. This sheet exemplifies how a single waterway could be reframed under multiple toponyms, with Hiroshige treating each name as a distinct meisho worthy of its own pictorial portrait.