Illustrated Book of Professions with Kyōka (Kyōka Yamato jinbutsu), 1st of 7 Volumes

Illustrated Book of Professions with Kyoka (Kyoka Yamato jinbutsu), the first of seven volumes published in 1857, presents Utagawa Hiroshige working in the book format rather than as a designer of single-sheet prints. The project gathers depictions of Japanese trades and occupations paired with kyoka, the satirical thirty-one-syllable verses that filled the leisure hours of Edo literati, and the seven volumes together amount to a sustained social portrait of the working population of late Tokugawa Japan. Hiroshige, by then in the last year of his life, draws carpenters, fishermen, peddlers, monks, courtesans, performers, and craftspeople with the same observational economy he applied to his celebrated Edo ukiyo-e landscape print designs, but with greater emphasis on costume detail, tool, and gesture. The first volume sets the program: each opening features a small group of figures defined by their professional implements, framed lightly within domestic or street settings, with kyoka by various poets inscribed alongside. The Harvard Art Museums copy retains the binding and full sequence of designs, allowing study of how Hiroshige paced the social survey across the volume. As a document of mid-nineteenth-century occupational life and as a late example of the designer's adaptability across formats, the book complements the landscape work for which Hiroshige is best known and broadens any collector's sense of his range.