Numazu, from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)," also known as the Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido)

Numazu, from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)," also known as the Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido), is an early-1830s woodblock print by Utagawa Hiroshige. Numazu was the twelfth post station on the highway between Edo and Kyoto, situated near the mouth of the Kano River where it meets Suruga Bay. Hiroshige's Kyoka iri Tokaido set, distinguished from his other Tokaido editions by the kyoka comic verses that accompany each station view, allowed publisher and artist to combine the practical interest of a guidebook with the literary play of Edo poetry circles. In this Numazu print, the artist uses the station's coastal setting to compose a scene around water, boats, and travelers along a low embankment, with Mount Fuji or the surrounding hills providing a stable horizon. Hiroshige's tonal handling, soft gradations of blue through the sky and water, brown and tan in the foreground figures and ground, is typical of his earliest Tokaido editions, where the lessons of his journey along the road in the early 1830s are still freshly absorbed. This impression is held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Numazu within the Kyoka iri Tokaido demonstrates Hiroshige's ability to make each station a self-contained miniature of place, weather, and society, and helps establish him, alongside Hokusai, as the defining figure in Edo ukiyo-e landscape print production of the nineteenth century.