Autumn View of Takanawa (Takanawa aki no kei), from the series Famous Places in Edo (Edo meisho)

Autumn View of Takanawa (Takanawa aki no kei) belongs to Utagawa Hiroshige's series Famous Places in Edo (Edo meisho), a body of Edo ukiyo-e landscape prints devoted to celebrated sites within the shogunal capital. Takanawa, on the southern edge of Edo facing the bay, was famous for its long causeway lined with travelers and porters streaming toward and away from the city's southern gateway, and for the broad views it offered of ships at anchor. Hiroshige arranges the scene to take advantage of both: a foreground populated with small, distinctly observed figures gives the print a sense of bustle and human scale, while the open expanse of water beyond is rendered in flat, restrained color, the line of the far shore left as a low band on the horizon. The autumn theme is signaled with cool blues and silvery greys rather than dramatic foliage, an example of the understated seasonal coding common in Hiroshige's work. As a landscape print from the meisho-e tradition, the sheet was designed to function both as a memento for those who had visited Takanawa and as an imagined journey for Edo ukiyo-e buyers who had not. The impression at the Harvard Art Museums shows the clean keyblock and the carefully graded sky that distinguished Edo workshop printing at its best.