Station 17 -- Satta Pass, Yui (Yui, Satta-mine), from the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (Tōkaidō gojūsan-tsugi no uchi)

Station 17 — Satta Pass, Yui, dated 1855, is a celebrated Tōkaidō design by Utagawa Hiroshige in which the Edo ukiyo-e master returns to one of the most dramatic landscapes on the highway. The Satta Pass, between Yui and Okitsu, climbed along cliffs above Suruga Bay and offered a famously commanding view of Mount Fuji and the coast far below. In this 1855 landscape print Hiroshige sets travelers on a narrow, steep path at the cliff's edge, the rocky pass rendered with assertive forms and dark contours, while the bay opens out into a wide expanse of water bounded by the perfect cone of Fuji on the horizon. The composition exemplifies one of his most characteristic strategies: a precarious, near foreground in vivid color and texture, juxtaposed with a serene, distant prospect that resolves the energy of the climb into stillness. The Satta Pass had been a key motif since the 1833 Hōeidō Tōkaidō, and Hiroshige reworked it across multiple later series, each time finding new pictorial possibilities in the relationship between cliff, sea, and mountain. The Harvard Art Museums impression of this 1855 design preserves a high-quality version of one of his most admired Tōkaidō stations and documents the continued vitality of the highway subject late in his career.