Poem by Emperor Gotoba

Poem by Emperor Gotoba, dated 1845 and held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, is part of the same Edo ukiyo-e project as the Jakuren sheet, in which Utagawa Hiroshige illustrated selected verses from the Hyakunin Isshu in landscape format. The retired Emperor Go-Toba (1180–1239), best remembered for his patronage of the Shinkokinshū and his role in the failed Jōkyū Disturbance, contributes a poem whose tone of regretful detachment Hiroshige translates into pictorial mood rather than narrative scene. The upper portion of the print carries the verse in a cloud-shaped cartouche, while below the design opens onto a riverside landscape in which a few small boats, willow trees, and distant hills propose a sense of the world being observed at a remove. As elsewhere in this group, the artist's palette is restrained: soft browns and greens for the embankment, a pale band of yellow for the late-afternoon sky, and gentle blue washes for the water. The composition is organized vertically, so that the eye is led from the courtly poem at the top down through atmospheric layers to the modest, contemporary life depicted on the riverbank. The combination of imperial verse and ordinary scenery is characteristic of how Hiroshige and his publishers reframed classical poetry for a broad Edo audience, embedding it in a recognizable landscape print rather than a courtly miniature, and the Victoria and Albert Museum impression preserves the design with its careful registration intact.