Evening Glow at Ryogoku

Evening Glow at Ryogoku, dated 1843 and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, is one of Utagawa Hiroshige's many Edo ukiyo-e landscape prints devoted to the Ryogoku bridge district, the great social and visual crossroads of the Sumida River. The work captures the moment of yuyake, the warm light that suffuses the sky at sunset, bathing the river and its boats in soft colour. Across the composition spreads the long horizontal span of the Ryogoku bridge, beneath which pleasure boats with parties of revellers drift in the cooler air of evening. The pictorial structure relies on Hiroshige's familiar grammar: a foreground anchor of bank or boat, a middle ground of water with figures, and a long bridge as the horizontal accent against a luminous sky. Bokashi printing across the upper portion of the sheet evokes the gradation from coloured sunset down to the deepening blue of the river. As a subject Ryogoku held inexhaustible appeal for Hiroshige, who recorded it in many guises, from snowfall to fireworks to summer cooling. This 1843 example contributes to that wider Sumida cycle, sitting comfortably between his earlier set-pieces and the great One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. For collectors and historians of Japanese woodblock prints, the image is a model of how landscape, urban life, and atmosphere could be united, demonstrating once again that for Hiroshige the city of Edo was as compelling a subject as any rural highway.