Suhara, from the series Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kisokaido

Suhara, from the Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kisokaido, is part of one of Utagawa Hiroshige's most important collaborative landscape print series, designed jointly with Keisai Eisen between roughly 1835 and 1838. While Eisen began the project, Hiroshige completed the majority of the designs, including the Suhara station deep in the mountainous Kiso valley of present-day Nagano. The Kisokaido was the inland alternative to the coastal Tokaido, running through cooler, more rugged country, and Hiroshige's images capture that distinct atmosphere with a quieter, more melancholy mood than his Edo ukiyo-e Tokaido sets. In the Suhara design, a sudden rainstorm sweeps across the landscape; travelers and packhorses huddle along the road as sheets of rain, rendered in fine parallel lines, cut diagonally across the entire composition. A river runs through the valley below, and densely wooded hills enclose the view, evoking the sense of being deep within mountain country where weather changes without warning. The image is built almost entirely from greens, browns, grays, and the unprinted paper that suggests the bright, washed-out light of a downpour. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds this 1835 impression, a particularly strong example of how Hiroshige translated the experience of road travel along the Kisokaido into a unified landscape print. Within the broader history of Edo-period printmaking, his Kisokaido designs are now seen as a counterpart of equal stature to the Tokaido series.