No. 47: Oi, from the series "Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaido (Kisokaido rokujukyu tsugi no uchi)"

No. 47: Oi is an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige, designed around 1830 for the series Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaido (Kisokaido rokujukyu tsugi no uchi) and held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The Kisokaido was the inland highway between Edo and Kyoto, traversing the mountainous Kiso valley, and the series, produced jointly by Hiroshige and Keisai Eisen, depicted the sixty-nine post stations along its route. Oi, station 47 in Mino Province, was situated in a less rugged but still rural stretch of the road. Hiroshige depicts the station with his customary restraint, layering low buildings, fields, and surrounding hills under a graded sky that situates the scene at a specific time of day. Travelers and locals move through the foreground, populating the design and signaling the daily working life of the road. The print exemplifies how Utagawa Hiroshige used architecture, terrain, and figural staging to capture the distinct character of each station along the route, building variety across the long series. The Art Institute of Chicago documents the work as part of its Hiroshige holdings, where it sits among other stations and other landscape series by the artist. As an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, the sheet contributes to a foundational nineteenth-century survey of internal Japanese geography, offering both topographical and emotional portraits of the highway's many waypoints. For collectors and scholars of Japanese woodblock prints, Oi remains an instructive example of Hiroshige's collaborative work on the Kisokaido series and of his interest in modest, lived environments as legitimate subjects for the meisho-e tradition, alongside more dramatic mountain passes and famous overlooks.