Benten Shrine and Inokashira Pond (Inokashira no ike Benten no yashiro), from the series "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei)"

Utagawa Hiroshige composed this view of Benten Shrine and Inokashira Pond in 1856 for One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei), the great series that occupied his final years. The Inokashira reservoir, fed by springs and ringed by wooded slopes, lay outside the densely built core of Edo and supplied much of the city's drinking water through a remarkable underground aqueduct system. At its center stood a small island bearing a shrine to Benten, the goddess of water, music, and eloquence borrowed into Shinto from Buddhist tradition. Hiroshige frames the scene from a high vantage that pushes the dark water and its shimmering reflections into the middle of the sheet; the shrine and its scarlet torii are nested within the dense green of pines and deciduous trees. Pilgrims thread a path along the bank toward the bridge that leads to the island, lending a quiet human pulse to a fundamentally meditative landscape print. The atmospheric vertical format, the saturated greens, and the carefully gradated blue water are signatures of his late Edo ukiyo-e style. This impression of the One Hundred Famous Views is preserved in the Clarence Buckingham Collection of Japanese prints at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it remains among the most studied examples of the series.