Shirasuka: View of Shiomi Slope (Shirasuka, Shiomizaka no zu), from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)," also known as the Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido)

Shirasuka: View of Shiomi Slope, from Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, also known as the Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido), is a landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858), part of one of the several Tokaido cycles he undertook after the Hoeido Tokaido of the early 1830s. Shirasuka was the thirty-second station on the road, situated in what is now Shizuoka Prefecture, and was best known for Shiomizaka, the Shiomi Slope, a stretch of the road that climbed a ridge with sweeping views toward the Pacific Ocean. The slope's name, literally tide-viewing slope, registered the experience of travelers reaching the summit and seeing the broad expanse of the sea below them. Hiroshige treats this moment by orienting the composition so the road climbs through the foreground and the ocean opens out in the distance, with travelers strung along the path providing scale and narrative animation. As a landscape print within the Edo ukiyo-e tradition, Shirasuka demonstrates Hiroshige's continuing capacity to find fresh compositional approaches to the same fifty-three stations after his initial breakthrough series. The Kyoka iri Tokaido added comic verse to each station, integrating word and image in a manner familiar from earlier printed road guides. The 1832 date situates this series among the immediate successors to the Hoeido Tokaido in Hiroshige's prolific engagement with the road. The impression is held in the Art Institute of Chicago, which preserves impressions from multiple Hiroshige Tokaido series and allows comparative study of his evolving approach.