Badger, from the series "Mirror of Stone Rubbings of Views of the Provinces" (Kohon meihitsu ishizuri kagami)
- Date:
- n.d.
- Medium:
- Woodblock print; ishizuri-e, harimaze
- Source:
- Art Institute of Chicago
Utagawa Hiroshige's "Badger," from the series "Mirror of Stone Rubbings of Views of the Provinces (Kohon meihitsu ishizuri kagami)," dated 1797 in the Art Institute of Chicago's catalogue, is an unusual entry in the Edo ukiyo-e canon. The series imitates the appearance of stone-rubbing prints, ishizuri-e, in which images are pulled from carved stelae as silvery white forms against a deep, inky ground. Here Hiroshige uses that idiom to depict a tanuki, the Japanese badger long woven into folklore as a shape-shifting trickster and a mascot of prosperity. Set within the larger "Mirror of Stone Rubbings" project, the animal subject becomes a kind of provincial emblem, presented with the gravity normally reserved for famous landscapes and shrines. The flattened tonality and crisp silhouette flatten depth into pattern, encouraging the eye to read the badger almost heraldically. For collectors of landscape print culture and Edo-period meisho-e, this sheet is a reminder that Hiroshige's series-based approach to provincial Japan ranged beyond strict topography to include the creatures, objects, and legends that gave each region its character. The stone-rubbing conceit also nods to scholarly antiquarian culture in late Edo, when literati prized rubbings as records of carved poems, temple inscriptions, and rare reliefs. By translating those associations into the world of commercial woodblock prints, Hiroshige helped expand what ukiyo-e could represent. Now preserved at the Art Institute of Chicago, this Utagawa Hiroshige badger print offers a compact case study in how the Edo ukiyo-e workshop borrowed visual languages from outside its tradition, blending folk imagery and scholarly aesthetics into a single, immediately legible design that remains compelling to viewers of Japanese woodblock prints today.
Wakasa Kugushiko
1920
Color woodblock print; oban
Woodblock print
1934
Color woodblock print; oban
n.d.
Woodblock print; ishizuri-e, section of harimaze sheet
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
Badger, from the series "Mirror of Stone Rubbings of Views of the Provinces" (Kohon meihitsu ishizuri kagami) was created by Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川広重) in n.d..
Badger, from the series "Mirror of Stone Rubbings of Views of the Provinces" (Kohon meihitsu ishizuri kagami) depicts landscapes and animals.
