Kanō, from the series Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō

Kano, the fifty-third station on the inland Kisokaido road through Mino Province (modern Gifu Prefecture), is treated in this 1835 landscape print from the great series Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaido, a project Hiroshige completed after Keisai Eisen withdrew from the original commission. Where the Tokaido followed the coast, the Kisokaido cut through mountains and river valleys, and the series gave Utagawa Hiroshige a chance to engage with a different kind of Edo ukiyo-e landscape print: inland weather, dense forest, river crossings, and the small castle towns that punctuated the route. At Kano the artist focuses on the town's place beneath a low ridge, with travelers, packhorses, and shops scaled to the broad horizontal sheet. Published by Iseya Rihei (Kinjudo) and Takenouchi Magohachi (Hoeido), the Kisokaido series became one of the touchstones of nineteenth-century Japanese landscape and is now distributed across major print collections worldwide. The Cleveland Museum of Art's impression preserves the carefully balanced color and atmospheric tone for which the set is admired, with the cool greens and grays of the inland provinces taking the place of the more saturated palette Hiroshige used for the coastal Tokaido. As one of the late stations before the route's terminus near Kyoto, Kano represents both a literal station on the highway and a stage in the artist's development of a fully realized Japanese topographical print tradition.