Omi Province: Lake Biwa and Ishiyama Temple (Omi, Biwako Ishiyamadera), from the series "Famous Places in the Sixty-odd Provinces (Rokujuyoshu meisho zue)"

Omi Province: Lake Biwa and Ishiyama Temple (Omi, Biwako Ishiyamadera), from the series "Famous Places in the Sixty-odd Provinces (Rokujuyoshu meisho zue)," was published in 1853 by Utagawa Hiroshige. The Rokujuyoshu meisho zue is an ambitious vertical-format series covering the historical provinces of Japan one by one, allowing the artist to extend his landscape print practice across the whole archipelago rather than along a single road. Omi Province, dominated by Lake Biwa (the largest freshwater lake in Japan), was a recurring subject in classical poetry and Edo ukiyo-e, particularly through the canonical Eight Views of Omi (Omi hakkei). Hiroshige's design centers on Ishiyama Temple, a Shingon foundation on the lake's southwestern shore famous in literary history as the site where Murasaki Shikibu is said to have begun composing The Tale of Genji. The composition uses the vertical format to layer foreground temple architecture and rocky outcrops against a broad expanse of lake, with distant hills closing the horizon and the soft tonal gradations in water and sky that are Hiroshige's signature. This impression is held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The print shows how Hiroshige's late Edo ukiyo-e style, with its dramatic foreground motifs and atmospheric distance, lent itself to a national survey of place, taking the conventions of the famous-place picture (meisho-e) and applying them province by province.