Evening Bell at Shōmyō (Shōmyō banshō), from the series Eight Views of Kanazawa (Kanazawa hakkei)

Evening Bell at Shomyo (Shomyo bansho) from Eight Views of Kanazawa (Kanazawa hakkei) belongs to one of Utagawa Hiroshige's many adaptations of the venerable Chinese Eight Views convention to a Japanese location. The Kanazawa here is not the more familiar castle town on the Sea of Japan but rather the seaside hamlet of Kanazawa-Mutsuura south of Edo in Musashi Province, near present-day Yokohama, long celebrated as a poetic landscape and a destination for the cultured sightseeing of Edo literati. The 'Evening Bell at Shomyo' is one of the canonical eight motifs, here associated with the temple of Shomyoji and the moment when its bell rings out across the harbor at dusk. Hiroshige's design dims the palette toward indigo and grey, sets the temple roofs in silhouette against a quiet hillside, and lets the bay carry the rumor of the bell out across the water. Bokashi gradations move the eye from temple to harbor to distant ridge. As an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, the Shomyo bansho sheet exemplifies how Hiroshige used borrowed compositional formulas to deepen the contemplative weight of a real Japanese place. The Harvard Art Museums impression preserves the disciplined tonal handling and the soft registration of the temple architecture against the dusk sky.