No. 66: Echikawa, from the series "Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaido (Kisokaido rokujukyu tsugi no uchi)"

No. 66: Echikawa, from the series Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaido (Kisokaido rokujukyu tsugi no uchi), is a landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige held in the Art Institute of Chicago. The Kisokaido series was a collaborative project published by Iseya Rihei, begun by Keisai Eisen and completed by Hiroshige, that traced the inland road from Edo to Kyoto through the mountainous Nakasendo route. Echikawa is the sixty-sixth station on the road, located in present-day Shiga Prefecture as the route approaches Lake Biwa and the final descent toward the imperial capital. In Hiroshige's hands the station becomes a study of road life rather than monumental architecture: travellers move along a track through cultivated fields, the silhouettes of mountains shape the middle distance, and the print's colour blocks supply the season and the time of day. The Kisokaido is generally regarded alongside the Hoeido Tokaido as one of the great achievements of the Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, and the contrast between the inland Kisokaido and the coastal Tokaido offered nineteenth-century buyers two complementary geographies of travel between the political and imperial capitals. Hiroshige's Kisokaido designs tend toward quieter, more rural compositions, and Echikawa belongs to the closing sequence in which the landscape opens out as the route reaches the plain. For viewers studying Hiroshige's development as a designer of meisho-e and travel imagery, the Kisokaido prints in the Art Institute of Chicago's collection provide essential context for the Tokaido and Edo Hyakkei series that bracket them.