Kawasaki, from the 53 Stations of the Tokaido

Kawasaki, from the 53 Stations of the Tokaido, returns Utagawa Hiroshige to the highway he made his own across multiple successive series. Kawasaki was the second post-station out of Nihonbashi, marking the point where travelers heading west crossed the Rokugo River from Edo into Musashi by ferry. Hiroshige's compositions of the station typically center on this crossing: flat-bottomed boats poled along the broad river, travelers and porters waiting in clusters on the near bank, and in the distance the soft outline of Mount Fuji rising above the riverside fields. The Harvard Art Museums sheet documents one of Hiroshige's revisits to the subject, a design notable for its quiet handling of water and atmosphere. Bokashi gradations in indigo move the eye from foreground reeds to mid-water boats to distant mountain ridge, while small figures placed along the banks anchor the scale. The print exemplifies how Hiroshige used the Tokaido as a recurring laboratory for the Edo ukiyo-e landscape print: each new series let him refine his treatment of well-known stations and explore variations of weather, time of day, and human activity. For collectors and scholars, the Kawasaki designs offer a particularly clear way of comparing Hiroshige's evolving compositional thinking, since the basic subject of the river crossing remains constant while the pictorial solution shifts from edition to edition.