Ryogoku Bridge and the Great Riverbank (Ryogokubashi Okawabata), from the series "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei)"

Ryogoku Bridge and the Great Riverbank (Ryogokubashi Okawabata) is an 1856 print from Utagawa Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei). The Ryogoku district, where the Ryogokubashi bridge spanned the Sumida River, was a focal point of Edo urban life: a place of fireworks, festivals, food stalls, sumo, and constant pedestrian traffic between the central city and the eastern districts. In this Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, Hiroshige sets the great wooden bridge across the upper portion of the design, where its arched span carries dense crowds across the river. Below, the Okawabata, or 'great riverbank,' is lined with boats, restaurants, and waiting passengers, suggesting the social bustle that gave the area its identity. The river itself, treated with carefully gradated bokashi in shades of blue, becomes a stage on which the activity of the city unfolds. Hiroshige uses the vertical format of the Hyakkei series to create an unusually steep, almost cinematic view that allows him to register both the architecture of the bridge and the small-scale incidents along the bank. The result is at once topographical and atmospheric: viewers recognize a specific, famous location, but also feel the texture of Edo summer afternoons. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this impression, an excellent representative of the way the One Hundred Famous Views series celebrated the city as a network of crowded, water-defined meeting places.