The Banks of the Sumida River

The Banks of the Sumida River is an 1857 landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858), one of his late views of the Edo waterfront produced in the year before his death. The Sumida River was the principal artery of Edo, dividing the eastern districts of Honjo and Fukagawa from the central city and serving as both transportation route and recreational space. Its banks supported teahouses, theaters, shrines, and the great spectacle of cherry-blossom viewing at Mukojima each spring. Hiroshige had drawn on Sumida subjects throughout his career and returned to them with renewed intensity in the late 1850s, when he assembled the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. The Banks of the Sumida River participates in this larger project, fixing a familiar stretch of the river with the attention to weather, season, and human incident that defines his late style. The composition treats the river as a horizontal field of water punctuated by passing boats and bordered by tree-lined embankments, with figures at the water's edge or aboard small craft providing scale and narrative interest. As a landscape print, this work demonstrates Hiroshige's commitment to the meisho-e tradition at the close of his life. The Edo ukiyo-e print, by the end of the Tokugawa period, had become a sophisticated medium for civic self-representation, and Hiroshige stood at the center of that achievement. The impression is held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, which preserves a significant Hiroshige collection that includes other Sumida views from the same late period.