Evening View of Eight Famous Sites at Kanazawa (Buyo Kanazawa hassho yakei)

Evening View of Eight Famous Sites at Kanazawa is a triptych landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige from 1857, depicting the harbour and inlets of Kanazawa (a coastal area south of Edo near present-day Yokohama) under the light of a rising moon. The Eight Views of Kanazawa, modelled on the older Eight Views of Omi around Lake Biwa, were among the canonical regional landscape sets of the Edo period. Hiroshige integrates all eight sites into a single triptych composition: a long horizontal sweep of bay, headland, and lantern-lit harbour, with the moon over the central sheet binding the panorama together. The work is one of the most ambitious landscape triptychs in nineteenth-century Japanese printmaking, in which the conventional unit of three sheets is treated as a continuous landscape rather than as three loosely related compositions. Deep indigo bokashi across the sea and sky provides the atmospheric ground for the small warm points of lantern light that mark each of the eight named places. The Edo ukiyo-e landscape print at triptych scale could approach the function of a folding screen painting, and this Kanazawa is one of the clearest examples of that ambition. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the full triptych in its Clarence Buckingham Collection, where the three sheets are kept together as an integrated composition.