Teppōzu and Tsukuda Island (Teppōzu Tsukudajima), The Temple of Bush Clover at Oshiage (Oshiage Hagidera), and Dancers in the Festival of Oji Shrine from the series Cutout Pictures of Famous Places in Edo (Edo meisho harimaze zue)

This harimaze sheet from Utagawa Hiroshige's Edo meisho harimaze zue gathers three Edo subjects — Teppōzu and Tsukuda Island, the bush-clover temple at Oshiage, and dancers at the Ōji shrine festival — into a single multi-cell composition typical of the format. Harimaze prints were designed to be cut apart and pasted into albums, although many were also kept whole as decorative single sheets, and they offered Hiroshige a way to repackage his accumulated knowledge of Edo's famous places into compact, flexible products. Teppōzu and Tsukuda were neighborhoods at the mouth of the Sumida, associated with fishing communities and harbor traffic; Oshiage's Hagidera was a temple celebrated for its autumn bush clover; and Ōji's shrine festival featured ceremonial dances and was a major draw on the city's outskirts. Each cell distills the locale to a few characteristic motifs in the manner of his landscape print designs, with figures, architecture, water, and seasonal indicators arranged within a clear frame. The juxtaposition of three unrelated sites on one sheet reflects the harimaze logic of the Edo print market and shows the breadth of the Edo ukiyo-e master's repertoire. The Harvard Art Museums impression preserves a complete example of this collaborative format and documents Hiroshige's continued interest in compiling Edo's varied attractions into novel arrangements.