Five Pines, Onagi Canal (Onagigawa Gohonmatsu), Number 97 from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei)

Number 97 in Utagawa Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei) depicts the Five Pines (Gohonmatsu), a small but locally celebrated grouping of pine trees on the bank of the Onagi Canal in the Fukagawa district east of central Edo. Issued in 1856 as part of his last great landscape print series, this sheet is a masterful study in pictorial restraint: the canal is reduced to a calm horizontal band of greyed blue; a pleasure boat with a single passenger and rower is silhouetted against the water; and the famous pines rise from the embankment with characteristic gnarled silhouettes that Hiroshige draws with deliberate, almost portrait-like attention. The Edo ukiyo-e format, vertical oban, is used to dramatize scale, with the pines stretching up the sheet and their lower trunks framing the view. Like much of the Meisho Edo hyakkei, the composition feels at once topographically specific and abstractly designed, a quality that proved deeply influential on later Western printmakers. The Harvard Art Museums impression preserves the carefully graded sky, the rich pine greens, and the soft greys of the canal that distinguish good early printings.