Clear Weather After Snow at Nihon Bridge (Nihonbashi yukibare), from the series "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei)"

Clear Weather After Snow at Nihon Bridge (Nihonbashi yukibare) is a 1856 landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige and one of the earliest designs in his final series, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei). Nihonbashi, the "Japan Bridge," was the symbolic center of Edo and the official starting point of all five great highways radiating from the shogun's capital. Hiroshige adopts a high oblique viewpoint, looking along the snow-covered bridge from above and behind so that its parallel railings drive diagonally across the lower third of the design. Beyond it, the city's white-walled fish market and warehouses are blanketed in fresh snow, the brilliant sun catching highlights on every roof. A pale indigo Sumida River curves into the middle distance, and on the horizon Mount Fuji rises above Edo Castle. The composition is one of the most often-reproduced in late Edo ukiyo-e, admired for its synthesis of urban topography, atmospheric weather, and famous distant landmarks. The clear-weather snow scene (yukibare) is a beloved subject in Japanese poetry and Hiroshige treats it here with a refined balance of brilliant white impressions, careful indigo bokashi, and small accents of human movement on the bridge. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves the unprinted snow with its full crisp brightness and the carefully graduated tones of the river and the distant city.