Full Moon on Kanazawa, Musashi

Full Moon on Kanazawa, Musashi, dated 1857, is a sheet from the same great late triptych project on which Utagawa Hiroshige set the eight famous places of Kanazawa under a single full moon. Kanazawa, on the coast of Musashi Province south of Edo, was the Japanese answer to the Chinese Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang, and its inlets, pines, and temple-crowned headlands had been gathered into poetic series since medieval times. In this composition Hiroshige raises the moon high above a curving stretch of bay, allowing its pale disc and the broad band of luminous water to dominate the upper register; below, sailboats, fishermen, and the lights of villages along the shore are distributed with the deliberate spacing of a screen painting. The deep mineral blues, mica-tinted sky, and refined gradations of the printer's bokashi exemplify the technical apex of Edo ukiyo-e landscape print production in the late 1850s. The work is preserved in the Cleveland Museum of Art and stands as a complement to the museum's other holdings of Hiroshige's evening Kanazawa, making it possible to trace the artist's distillation of the eight-view tradition into a single, hushed moonlit synthesis.