Ishiyakushi

Ishiyakushi by Utagawa Hiroshige depicts the forty-fourth post-town of the Tokaido between Kyoto and Edo, a station tied to Ishiyakushi-ji, a temple dedicated to Yakushi Nyorai, the Healing Buddha. Hiroshige treated Ishiyakushi in several of his landscape print series on the Tokaido, including the celebrated Hoeido edition that established his reputation in the early 1830s. As Edo ukiyo-e of the road, this sheet typically uses a rural register: rice paddies, low farmhouses, distant mountains, and travelers moving along an open road through the agrarian landscape of Ise Province. The temple itself may appear in the middle distance, set among trees, while figures with hats and walking sticks anchor the foreground. Hiroshige's measured composition, gentle atmospheric gradation, and feeling for the in-between moments of travel -- not the dramatic gates of the great cities but the quieter agricultural stretches between -- give his Ishiyakushi prints their particular humane character. The Audrey and Harry Hahn Gift impression at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, indexed on ukiyo-e.org, sits within the larger family of his Tokaido stations and confirms how successfully he made each of the fifty-three post-towns into a memorable landscape print, even when, as at Ishiyakushi, the subject was a quiet rural pause rather than a famous city or monument.