Mokuboji Temple, Uchigawa Inlet, Gozensaihata (Mokuboji Uchigawa Gozensaihata), Number 92 from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei)

Mokuboji Temple, Uchigawa Inlet, Gozensaihata, dated 1857, is Number 92 in Utagawa Hiroshige's Meisho Edo hyakkei (One Hundred Famous Views of Edo), the great late series that crowned his career as the Edo ukiyo-e master. Mokuboji, a temple on the east bank of the Sumida River associated with the medieval Nō play Sumidagawa and the legend of Umewakamaru, sat near Gozensaihata, an area of rice fields and waterways. Hiroshige organizes the composition around water and field, with the inlet of Uchigawa cutting across the design, banks of trees framing the temple grove, and figures on the embankments giving scale to the broad agricultural plain. The landscape print conventions of Meisho Edo hyakkei — a strong foreground motif, a deep middle distance, atmospheric color gradation in the sky, and recognizable architectural or topographical landmarks — work here in their fully developed late form. The series as a whole has been admired for the way it turns Edo into a sequence of meditative, almost lyric impressions, and the Mokuboji sheet contributes one of its quieter rural-urban views to that survey. The Harvard Art Museums impression of this 1857 design documents the print as a high-quality example from one of the most influential landscape series in the history of ukiyo-e.