Evening Snow at Kambara (number sixteen of the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido)

Evening Snow at Kambara is among the most celebrated single sheets in the history of Japanese printmaking, number sixteen of Utagawa Hiroshige's Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, published around 1833 by Hoeido. The Kambara station on the actual Tokaido sat near the Pacific coast and rarely received heavy snow, so the design is more imaginative meteorology than topographic record. Hiroshige composes the sheet around three small figures making their way through deep snowfall on a steep path between drifted roofs. The sky has been printed in dark grey or black at the upper register and gradates down through bokashi to a soft pale grey along the slope, with the snow rendered as the unprinted white of the paper. The chromatic restraint is total: dark sky, white snow, the muted brown-pink of a few visible roofs, and the three small dabs of warm colour belonging to the figures' clothes. As an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, Kambara represents the artist at his most poetic and most demanding of his collaborators, with the bokashi gradation of sky being one of the most consistently studied print effects in early nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock production. The Cleveland Museum of Art preserves an impression of the design, and Kambara is among the very small group of Tokaido sheets for which condition and saturation are debated in the catalogues of every important sale.