Dyers' Quarter, Kanda (Kanda Kon'ya-chō), Number 75 from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei)

Dyers' Quarter, Kanda (Kanda Kon'ya-cho), Number 75 from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei), dated 1857, is among the most visually striking sheets in Utagawa Hiroshige's late masterwork. The Kon'ya-cho was the district of indigo dyers in the Kanda neighborhood, where long bolts of dyed cotton hung out to dry from tall poles ran in regular ranks above the street. Hiroshige isolates this vertical pattern of striped fabric against the sky, organizing the entire composition around the rhythmic dark-and-light columns of indigo cloth. Mount Fuji rises small and clear in the distance between the cloth ranks, and a fire-watchtower marks the skyline above the houses. As an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, the design is a striking example of how the late Hiroshige found pictorial subject matter in the working industries of the city, turning the practical apparatus of the dyer's trade into an almost abstract pattern of vertical and horizontal forms. The Harvard Art Museums impression preserves the saturated indigo of the cloth, the pale blue of the sky, and the careful registration of the small distant Fuji. Among the Hundred Famous Views, this sheet has long been admired by modernist designers and architects for its near-graphic abstraction and its unflinching attention to ordinary urban labor.