Dragons Among Clouds

Dragons Among Clouds, dated 1844, is a relatively unusual subject within the work of Utagawa Hiroshige, whose career was overwhelmingly defined by landscape print and meisho designs. Here, instead of a Tokaido station or a famous Edo view, the artist offers a vertical pair of dragons coiling through dense banks of cloud and rolling waves. Dragons (ryu) had long held an important place in East Asian religious and pictorial tradition, associated with imperial authority, water, and the protection of Buddhist law, and they appeared regularly in painted hanging scrolls, screens, and temple decoration. Hiroshige's design adapts that lofty subject to the medium of color woodblock prints intended for the Edo ukiyo-e market. The forms of the dragons emerge from carefully drawn outlines, then are modeled with overprinting in greens, blacks, and washes that suggest scaly bodies appearing and disappearing through mist. Bokashi gradients build up the depth of the cloud banks, while crisp wave patterns at the base of the design relate the creatures to the sea. Although best known as a landscape print designer, Hiroshige throughout his career produced bird-and-flower prints, surimono, and occasional figural or auspicious subjects of this kind. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this impression, an example of how an artist primarily celebrated for his views of Japan's roads and provinces could also turn his attention to a more traditional, symbolic theme rooted in older painting and religious imagery.