Original Fuji, Meguro (Meguro Moto-Fuji), Number 25 from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei)

Original Fuji, Meguro (Meguro Moto-Fuji), Number 25 from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei), dated 1856, comes from Utagawa Hiroshige's late masterwork, the series that occupied the last two years of his life. The Moto-Fuji at Meguro was a small artificial mountain built by adherents of the Fuji-ko, a popular religious confraternity devoted to Mount Fuji, who constructed scaled replicas of the sacred peak in their neighborhood shrines so that those unable to make the actual pilgrimage could perform a substitute ascent. Hiroshige's print frames the mound from above with a dense canopy of pine branches in the immediate foreground, opening through an aperture onto the moto-fuji itself and beyond to the silhouette of the real Fuji in the distance. The doubled image of the mountain, the artificial and the actual, is a witty pictorial conceit characteristic of the Meisho Edo hyakkei, in which Hiroshige consistently used compositional surprise to refresh familiar subjects. As an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, the sheet demonstrates the late Hiroshige's daring use of bold cropping, intense color, and vertical oban scale. The Harvard Art Museums impression preserves the saturated greens of the pine, the warm browns of the mound, and the cool blue gradation of the distant Fuji. The print remains among the most celebrated designs in the Hundred Famous Views.