Komagata Temple & Azuma Bridge

Komagata Temple and Azuma Bridge by Utagawa Hiroshige is an Edo riverfront landscape print in which two beloved landmarks anchor the composition: Komagata-do, the small Kannon hall on the western bank of the Sumida, and Azumabashi, the bridge a short distance upstream that connected the Asakusa side of the river to the eastern districts. Together the two sites formed one of the most photographed -- in the woodblock sense -- corners of the city. Hiroshige treats them as elements of an organized urban view, with the dark silhouette of the hall set against open sky, the bridge thrown across the river in a long horizontal, and boats moving across the water in the middle distance. As Edo ukiyo-e of the late Tokugawa period, the print exhibits his characteristic devices: gradations of imported indigo across sky and water, careful drawing of architectural detail, and small figures whose movement gives the city a sense of inhabited life. The Audrey and Harry Hahn Gift impression at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, indexed on ukiyo-e.org, complements his more famous treatments of the same area in One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, and confirms how often he returned to the Sumida riverbank to develop new compositions of bridge, temple, and boat -- one of the recurring matrices of his landscape print career.