Owaji Island, from the series Famous Places in the Sixty-odd Provinces [of Japan] ([Dai Nihon] Rokujūyoshū meisho zue)

Awaji Island, here transliterated as Owaji, was the celebrated subject for Awaji Province in Utagawa Hiroshige's vertical-format series Famous Places in the Sixty-odd Provinces of Japan (Dai Nihon Rokujuyoshu meisho zue), issued from 1853 onward. The project asked Hiroshige to find a representative view for every province in the country, and it gave him an unusual opportunity to imagine places he had never visited, drawing on guidebooks, earlier prints, and his own command of compositional formulas. For Awaji, the island that lies between the Inland Sea and Osaka Bay, he composed a steeply tilted landscape print in which the island's coastline and surrounding waters dominate the lower portion of the sheet, while a foreground rock or pine frames the view in the manner of classical Japanese landscape painting. The Edo ukiyo-e vertical format suited the bold, almost calligraphic compositions of the series, and the deep indigo bokashi at top and bottom helped unify the set across more than sixty sheets. The Harvard Art Museums impression of the Awaji print preserves the strong color contrasts and the tight registration on which the format depended.