Returning Sails at Tsukuda (Tsukuda no kihan), from the series "Eight Views of Edo (Edo hakkei)"

Returning Sails at Tsukuda (Tsukuda no kihan), from the series "Eight Views of Edo (Edo hakkei)," was published around 1839 by Utagawa Hiroshige. The print adapts the classical "Eight Views" template, originally tied to the Xiao and Xiang rivers in China, to the city of Edo, with Tsukuda standing in for the canonical motif of "returning sails." Tsukuda was an island settlement near the mouth of the Sumida River, populated largely by fishermen relocated from Settsu Province in the early seventeenth century. Its boats, returning at dusk with their day's catch, became an established Edo ukiyo-e subject. Hiroshige uses the motif to compose a quiet bay scene: sails fan across the water in echoing diagonals, the low silhouette of the Tsukuda waterfront sits against the horizon, and the sky modulates from cool blue at the top to a warmer band along the skyline, suggesting evening light. The picture relies on bokashi gradations and the careful spacing of sail shapes to build rhythm, an approach that distinguishes his Edo hakkei from the more declarative landscape prints of contemporaries. This impression is held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Returning Sails at Tsukuda illustrates Hiroshige's ability to inherit a continental literary motif, transplant it to the bay below his own city, and produce a landscape print that feels at once classical, urban, and entirely Edo in its sensibility.