Naitō Shinjuku, Yotsuya (Yotsuya Naitō Shinjuku), Number 86 from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei)

This 1857 landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige, the eighty-sixth design in the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei), depicts the post-station of Naito Shinjuku at Yotsuya from a vantage low to the ground. The composition is famously cropped: the rumps and hind legs of two packhorses dominate the foreground, while in the middle distance the modest shop-fronts and lanterns of the Shinjuku station extend along the Koshu Highway, with tiny figures of travelers and shopkeepers conducting their business. Heaps of fresh horse dung in the foreground emphasize the unpretentious, working-class character of the place. Naito Shinjuku, originally part of the Naito family's daimyo estate that gave way to a relay post on the road from Edo to the Kai region, had a reputation as a rough-edged district of inns, brothels, and stables; Hiroshige's choice of viewpoint refuses any sentimental polish and instead celebrates the gritty reality of the post-station. The composition exemplifies the boldness of cropping and unconventional vantage that distinguished the late Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, with bokashi gradation in the sky and careful registration of pigment in the horses' coats. This impression is preserved in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, where it documents Hiroshige's willingness to find lyrical beauty in the unglamorous outer edges of Edo and his role in extending the meisho genre into new territory.