Owari Province: Tenno Festival at Tsushima (Owari, Tsushima Tenno matsuri), from the series "Famous Places in the Sixty-odd Provinces (Rokujuyoshu meisho zue)"

Owari Province: Tenno Festival at Tsushima is a vertical landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige from his ambitious 1853 series Famous Places in the Sixty-odd Provinces (Rokujuyoshu meisho zue). The series set out to provide an emblematic image for every historical province of Japan, and Hiroshige used the format to extend the Edo ukiyo-e landscape print into a fully topographic atlas of the country. Tsushima, in what is now Aichi prefecture, was famous for its Gozu Tenno shrine and the riverine summer festival in which decorated boats, called makiwarabune, drifted across the water hung with hundreds of lanterns. Hiroshige treats the festival as a deep nightscape: dark river, deeper sky, and the glowing constellations of lantern-light arranged across the shrine boats. Reflections shimmer down into the water; figures crowd the banks. The design is a tour de force of restrained palette, with most of its visual impact concentrated in small areas of warm yellow lantern colour against an almost monochrome ground. Published by Koshimuraya Heisuke in Edo, the sheet belongs to a series collectors prize for its sustained imaginative breadth across more than seventy locations. The Art Institute of Chicago holds an impression in its Clarence Buckingham Collection, where the Tsushima sheet can be examined as both a regional ethnography and a meditation on the Edo ukiyo-e night print at its most assured.