Great Bridge at Senju

Great Bridge at Senju by Utagawa Hiroshige depicts the long timber span at Senju, the first northern post-town outside Edo on the Nikko and Oshu roads. The bridge over the Sumida River there was a familiar threshold of departure: travelers heading north paused at its head before walking out into the countryside, and the artist Matsuo Basho famously stepped off into his Narrow Road to the Deep North from this very spot. In Hiroshige's hands the structure becomes the spine of a landscape print, a strong, almost graphic horizontal across the picture plane that organizes the water below and the houses, mountains, or distant sky above. As Edo ukiyo-e, the work makes use of the conventions he developed across his Edo and Tokaido series: a measured horizontal format, layered atmospheric distance, small carefully placed figures who give the bridge scale, and the steady use of synthetic blue across river and sky. The Audrey and Harry Hahn Gift impression at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, registered on ukiyo-e.org, situates this view among Hiroshige's many treatments of Edo's bridges -- Nihonbashi, Ryogoku, Senju, Mannenbashi -- each presented as a civic monument tied to a particular route and a particular emotional register, in this case the bittersweet departure of the long northward journey.