No. 17, Yui: Satta Pass and Kurasawa Station (Satta tōge, Kurasawa tateba), from the series The Tōkaidō Road, The Fifty-three Stations (Tōkaidō, Gojūsan tsugi no uchi)

No. 17, Yui: Satta Pass and Kurasawa Station, dated 1845, comes from one of Utagawa Hiroshige's later Tōkaidō series in which the Edo ukiyo-e master revisited the highway that had defined his landscape print career. The Satta Pass between Yui and Okitsu was famous for its dramatic prospects over Suruga Bay and Mount Fuji, and Kurasawa was a tateba — a wayside rest stop — on the steep climb. Hiroshige's design integrates the human scale of the post house with the larger drama of the pass, showing travelers paused at the tateba while the cliffs and the bay below define a deep recession into the distance. The landscape print conventions developed in his earlier Hōeidō Tōkaidō are visible in mature form: a vivid foreground anchored by figures and architecture, a forceful middle ground of cliff and tree, and a distant prospect that resolves the energy of the climb into the calm of sea and sky. The Satta motif had become one of his signature subjects by 1845, and this design demonstrates the continuing inventiveness with which he reworked it. The Harvard Art Museums impression preserves the 1845 print at high quality and supports comparison with the various other Satta and Yui designs scattered across his Tōkaidō sequences.