Morning Snow at Susaki (Susaki yuki no asa), from the series "Thirteen Views of the Environs of Edo"
- Date:
- c. 1837/44
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print; ebangire, surimono
- Source:
- Art Institute of Chicago
Morning Snow at Susaki (Susaki yuki no asa), from the series "Thirteen Views of the Environs of Edo," is an early-1830s woodblock print by Utagawa Hiroshige. Susaki was a low-lying sandbar at the mouth of the Sumida River, prized in late Edo for its tea houses, shrine to Benten, and unobstructed views across the bay; it appears repeatedly in Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) as a site where city life meets open water. Hiroshige's Morning Snow at Susaki sets the place under a fresh, even fall of snow at dawn: rooflines, lanterns, and tree branches catch the white, while the bay opens out flat and pale to the horizon, with the unprinted paper doing much of the work of representing snow. The composition relies on a small number of dark accents, figures in the foreground, distant boats, the silhouettes of bare trees, against the chilled palette of blue-grey sky, soft snowfield, and lightly tinted sea. This impression is held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Within Hiroshige's body of work, the Thirteen Views of the Environs of Edo offered a more compact alternative to his fuller Edo series, focusing on satellite locales just beyond the shogunal capital and giving them the same dignity of treatment he reserved for famous Tokaido stations. As an example of his snow practice, Morning Snow at Susaki is a quietly definitive landscape print: an Edo ukiyo-e meditation on cold, light, and the way a familiar shoreline reads under new weather.
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.
Morning Snow at Susaki (Susaki yuki no asa), from the series "Thirteen Views of the Environs of Edo" was created by Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川広重) in c. 1837/44.
Morning Snow at Susaki (Susaki yuki no asa), from the series "Thirteen Views of the Environs of Edo" depicts landscapes and winter.
