Basho's Hut on Camellia Hill Beside the Aquaduct at Sekiguchi, from the series "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei)"

This 1857 design by Utagawa Hiroshige belongs to the celebrated Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) landscape print series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei) and is held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The site depicted, Tsubaki-yama or Camellia Hill at Sekiguchi, was a beloved literary location on the northwestern outskirts of the city, where the haiku poet Matsuo Basho was said to have lodged briefly in 1677 while supervising repairs on the nearby Kanda aqueduct. By Hiroshige's lifetime the modest thatched cottage had become a place of poetic pilgrimage. The composition uses the artist's mature vertical format to stack three distinct registers: a tiled rooftop and pine boughs in the foreground, the willow-shaded waterway of the Kanda Josui winding through the middle distance, and the gentle ridge of Camellia Hill rising into a soft pink sunset sky. A small figure crosses a footbridge near the hut, a quiet reminder of Basho's contemplative presence. Hiroshige integrates careful [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations in sky and water and a precise architectural rendering of the wooden aqueduct, balancing topographical accuracy with literary suggestion. The print exemplifies how Meisho Edo hyakkei transformed the conventional travel landscape into a layered map of memory, weaving haiku tradition, urban infrastructure, and seasonal mood into a single sheet. As one of the most poetically charged scenes in the series, it shows Hiroshige working at the peak of his powers as a designer of Edo views.