Fishing Boats at Tsukudajima (Tsukudajima gyoshū), from the series Thirty-six Views of the Eastern Capital (Tōto sanjūrokkei)

Fishing Boats at Tsukudajima (Tsukudajima gyoshū), from the series Thirty-six Views of the Eastern Capital (Tōto sanjūrokkei), dated 1862 and held by the Harvard Art Museums, is an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print associated with Utagawa Hiroshige's late and posthumous designs of Edo. Tsukudajima was a small island at the mouth of the Sumida River, home to a community of fishermen who supplied the city with whitebait and other catches, and the area had long held a strong identity within Edo's maritime landscape. In this Utagawa Hiroshige landscape print the artist focuses on a cluster of fishing boats at work or at anchor, with the island's modest buildings and the surrounding water forming a balanced composition. The Edo ukiyo-e idiom is well suited to such bayfront subjects: rhythmic patterns of sails, careful articulation of wave forms, and an overall palette of indigos and earth tones. The Thirty-six Views of the Eastern Capital reformulated, on a smaller scale, the structural logic of Hokusai's Fuji series and of Hiroshige's own One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, dividing the city into a programmable sequence of landscape print designs. The Harvard Art Museums impression preserves the disciplined registration and atmospheric bokashi characteristic of the series. The sheet exemplifies how Utagawa Hiroshige composition continued to shape the visual identity of Edo even after the artist's death.