Sea Fortifications

Dated 1853 and preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Sea Fortifications is an unusually contemporary subject for Utagawa Hiroshige, responding to the construction of the Odaiba defensive batteries in Edo Bay following Commodore Perry's first arrival that year. The Tokugawa government, alarmed by the appearance of the American squadron, ordered the rapid construction of a chain of artificial-island gun emplacements between Shinagawa and the harbor mouth; their building was a public spectacle in the city, and Hiroshige here treats the operation as a landscape print in the Edo ukiyo-e tradition. The composition places labor scenes in the foreground or middle ground—small boats ferrying stone and timber, gangs of workers shaping embankments—while the partially built fortifications rise like rough islands against the broad expanse of the bay. The familiar profile of Edo's distant rooftops or, depending on the impression, the suggestion of the shore at Shinagawa, closes off the background. Hiroshige's palette stays largely within his familiar register of blues, soft greys, and earthy browns, anchoring an unfamiliar subject within his established visual language. As a result the sheet sits at an important hinge in his late career: it is at once an Edo cityscape, a record of contemporary defensive policy, and a landscape print that quietly registers the political and military pressures bearing on the Tokugawa city in its last decades.