Sumiyoshi Bay at Naniwa

Sumiyoshi Bay at Naniwa is an 1856 landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858), the Edo ukiyo-e designer whose meisho-e views surveyed the famous places of Japan for a print-buying public concentrated in the shogunal capital. Naniwa is an old name for the area around Osaka, the great mercantile city of western Japan, and Sumiyoshi refers to the celebrated Sumiyoshi Taisha, one of Japan's most ancient Shinto shrines, founded in legendary antiquity and devoted to deities of the sea and protectors of seafaring. The shrine sits inland from the Osaka coastline, but the broader Sumiyoshi locale, including its bay, was firmly associated in classical poetry with pine-fringed shores and divine guardianship of voyages. Hiroshige composes the print with a wide view of the bay's waters, integrating the pine-lined coast and the distant horizon in a horizontal sweep that gives the work the contemplative breadth he favored for coastal subjects. As a landscape print, Sumiyoshi Bay at Naniwa demonstrates Hiroshige's continued engagement, in the final years of his life, with subjects drawn from the literary and religious geography of western Japan, far from his Edo base. The 1856 date places it among the last of his major topographical works, contemporary with the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Together such prints participate in a sweeping Hiroshige project of fixing the famous places of Japan, both ancient and contemporary, within the conventions of the woodblock landscape. The impression is held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.