No. 13, Numazu: The Ashigara Mountains and the Foot of Mt. Fuji (Ashigarayama, Fuji no suso), from the series The Tōkaidō Road, The Fifty-three Stations (Tōkaidō, Gojūsan tsugi no uchi)

No. 13, Numazu: The Ashigara Mountains and the Foot of Mt. Fuji belongs to a vertical Tokaido series that Utagawa Hiroshige designed in his later years, recasting the Edo ukiyo-e landscape print in an upright format that emphasized the height of mountains and the depth of the road. The Numazu station, on the coastal plain west of Mishima, was famous for its proximity to the foothills of the Ashigara range and for the view it offered of Mt. Fuji rising behind the nearer peaks. Hiroshige uses the tall sheet to stack these distances vertically: a foreground of road and travelers, a middle ground of forested ridges in the Ashigara mountains, and the broad lower slope of Fuji glimpsed above. The vertical Tokaido, sometimes called the Gyosho Tokaido by publishers, allowed Hiroshige to revisit stations he had treated in his earlier horizontal sets and to test the same subjects in a new aspect ratio. He typically reduces the figural narrative and amplifies geological scale, so the print reads less as a scene of inn culture than as a study in how the great volcano dominates the horizon for travelers approaching from the east. Now in the Harvard Art Museums, this design is a useful witness to the way Hiroshige continued to develop the Tokaido subject long after the success of the original Hoeido edition, finding new compositional possibilities in stations he had drawn many times before.