Hase Temple, Yamato Province (Yamato Hasedera), from the series One Hundred Famous Views in the Various Provinces (Shokoku meisho hyakkei)

Hase Temple, Yamato Province is one of the Yamato Province sheets from Hiroshige II's One Hundred Famous Views in the Various Provinces (Shokoku meisho hyakkei) of 1859. Hasedera, a Shingon Buddhist temple southeast of Nara, was one of the great pilgrimage sites of premodern Japan: founded in the eighth century and famous for its Eleven-Faced Kannon statue, for its 399-step covered staircase, and for the peonies and cherry blossoms that visitors came to see in late spring. Hiroshige II's composition takes the long covered stairway as the vertical organizing element of the tall ōban format, with the great wooden hondō (main hall) above and the gathering of pilgrims and resting porters below. The print exemplifies the way Hiroshige II adapted the meisho-e tradition his master had practiced in Edo to the temples and shrines of the Kinai and beyond, surveying a Japan that was already being prepared for the new domestic tourism of the Meiji period. The Art Institute of Chicago's impression (1939.2261), again from the Bruce Goff Archive, places the sheet in the same teaching context as the AIC's other Shokoku meisho hyakkei holdings.