Cherry-blossom Viewing at Asuka Hill (Asukayama hanami), from the series Famous Places in Edo (Kōto meisho)

Cherry-blossom Viewing at Asuka Hill (Asukayama hanami), from Famous Places in Edo (Koto meisho), depicts one of the great seasonal rituals of the shogun's capital. Asukayama, a low hill north of the city in present-day Kita Ward, had been planted with cherry trees in the early eighteenth century by Tokugawa Yoshimune as a place where commoners could enjoy hanami without the social restrictions of the daimyo gardens. By Utagawa Hiroshige's lifetime, the hill had become the most democratic of Edo's blossom-viewing destinations, drawing crowds from across the city for picnics, music, and informal performance. Hiroshige stages the scene with his characteristic gift for combining festive figure groups and landscape: visitors in spring kimono sit beneath canopies of pink blossoms, food bundles spread on mats, children running between trees, and in the distance the broad flats of Musashi Plain rolling out toward the horizon. The composition exemplifies the Edo ukiyo-e landscape print at its most sociable, where the topography of a famous place is given character by the seasonal humanity it gathers. The Harvard Art Museums impression preserves the delicate pink bokashi of the blossoms and the green-grey ground tones. Within the Koto meisho series, this Asukayama design remains one of the warmest celebrations of communal pleasure that Hiroshige ever drew.