Kanbara, from the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi), also known as the Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido), is a landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige dated to around 1832 and held in the Art Institute of Chicago. Kanbara was the fifteenth station of the Tokaido, in present-day Shizuoka City between Yui and Yoshiwara, sitting on the narrow coastal strip between Suruga Bay and the foothills running up to Mount Fuji. The station is forever associated with Hiroshige's Hoeido Kanbara, the celebrated night-snow scene in which villagers move silently through deep drifts under a slate sky. The Kyoka iri Tokaido offers an alternative interpretation of the same post town, paired here with a kyoka verse that grounds the landscape in a literary moment. Hiroshige's repeated returns to Kanbara across multiple Tokaido series reflect the importance of the station within the overall narrative of the road, even though in lived terms Kanbara was a relatively modest village. The Edo ukiyo-e landscape print derived much of its commercial power from such repetitions: print buyers could collect different artists' or different series' versions of the same station and compare them. The Art Institute of Chicago's preservation of multiple Hiroshige Tokaido sets makes this kind of comparative study possible, and Kanbara stands out as a case in which Hiroshige experimented across his career with very different moods, weather, and times of day for one site, demonstrating his understanding of the station as a flexible pictorial subject open to reinterpretation rather than a fixed view.
Wakasa Kugushiko
1920
Color woodblock print; oban
Woodblock print
1934
Color woodblock print; oban
n.d.
Woodblock print; ishizuri-e, section of harimaze sheet
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
Kanbara, from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)," also known as the Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido) was created by Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川広重) in c. 1837/42.
Kanbara, from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)," also known as the Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido) depicts landscapes, tōkaidō, and travel scenes.
