Clearing Weather at Awazu

Clearing Weather at Awazu is one of the eight canonical views of Lake Biwa codified in the Eight Views of Omi (Omi hakkei), a subject derived from earlier Chinese painting traditions and frequently revisited by Japanese artists. Awazu lay on the southern shore of the lake, close to Otsu and along the Tokaido road, and the established poetic image for it was clearing weather: a moment when storm clouds have passed and the broad expanse of the lake, ringed by hills, settles into sunlit calm. In this 1859 landscape print, Utagawa Hiroshige uses a low horizon and a cool, blue-dominant palette to set the lake against distant ridges, with small boats and figures along the shore giving scale to the scene. The Art Institute of Chicago's impression preserves the subtle bokashi gradations and clean registration characteristic of his late Omi prints. As an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, the sheet exemplifies the way Hiroshige treated classical poetic subjects: he kept the established theme and seasonal mood but reorganized the composition in horizontal landscape terms suited to woodblock printing and the urban Edo market for travel imagery. The date of 1859 places the impression after the artist's death in late 1858, suggesting that this is a posthumous issue from blocks already in circulation, a common arrangement for popular series.