Prince Genji in the Plum Blossom Garden (Fūryū Genji sono ume)

Prince Genji in the Plum Blossom Garden (Furyu Genji sono ume), dated 1853 and held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, is an Edo ukiyo-e print by Utagawa Hiroshige that draws on the immense popularity of nineteenth-century adaptations of the Tale of Genji. By the 1850s, the eleventh-century courtly novel had been transformed by Ryutei Tanehiko's serialized parody Nise Murasaki inaka Genji (A Fraudulent Murasaki's Bumpkin Genji) into a wildly successful fictional vehicle for an Edo-style hero, often pictured with a distinctive double-hairloop coiffure. Hiroshige stages the scene as an elegant garden scene: the Genji-figure stands or strolls among flowering plum trees, attended by a young companion or admiring serving women, with a glimpse of an aristocratic residence behind. Plum blossoms, harbinger of late winter and early spring, were strongly associated with refined courtly taste and with the classical Genji narrative itself. The composition makes generous use of bokashi gradations for sky and ground, and the restrained pink, lavender, and warm gray palette aligns the print with the more elegant figure designs of the early 1850s. While Hiroshige is best known for his landscape print series, this Edo ukiyo-e print demonstrates his fluency with figural and literary subjects, and his alertness to the period's appetite for fashionable hybrids of classical reference and contemporary visual culture.