Mitsuke: Ferries Crossing the Tenryu River, from the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, also known as the Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido), is a landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige in the Art Institute of Chicago, dated around 1832. Mitsuke was the twenty-eighth station on the Tokaido, located in present-day Iwata in Shizuoka Prefecture, where travellers reached the broad and unbridged Tenryu River and crossed by ferry. Hiroshige's design centres on the river itself, with low-slung wooden ferries laden with travellers, horses, and freight pushing across the current. The Tenryu's notorious swiftness and seasonal flooding made this crossing one of the more memorable obstacles of the road, and the practice of carrying officials, samurai, and merchants across in shallow-draft boats was a familiar feature of Tokaido travel. The Edo ukiyo-e landscape print absorbed such crossings as set pieces, allowing the designer to vary the rhythm of station-to-station picture-making with a different kind of episode. The Kyoka iri Tokaido edition, sometimes called the Sanoki Tokaido after its publisher, integrates a kyoka verse with each design, lending a literary frame to the image. Compared with the Hoeido Tokaido's better-known Mitsuke print, this version offers a complementary view of the same crossing in a slightly different register. The Art Institute of Chicago's example allows close study of Hiroshige's drawing of boats, water, and the postures of working ferrymen, and it underscores how the Tokaido's reputation as the route between the shogun's and emperor's capitals was sustained as much by such daily logistical realities as by its scenic vistas.
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.
Mitsuke: Ferries Crossing the Tenryu River (Mitsuke, Tenryugawa funawatashi), 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.
Mitsuke: Ferries Crossing the Tenryu River (Mitsuke, Tenryugawa funawatashi), from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)," also known as the Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido) depicts landscapes and tōkaidō.
