The City Flourishing, Tanabata Festival (Shichu han'ei Tanabata Matsuri), from the series “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei)”

The City Flourishing, Tanabata Festival is an 1857 landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige from his late masterwork series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei). Tanabata, the Star Festival on the seventh day of the seventh month, was observed in Edo through the raising of tall bamboo poles hung with strips of paper inscribed with wishes and poems, decorations of dried gourds, and bright streamers. Hiroshige sets the celebration in the dense urban fabric of central Edo. The viewer looks across a closely packed sea of roofs from an elevated vantage point: bamboo poles, slanting in slightly different directions, sprout from each household, and decorations clatter in the wind against a clear blue sky. In the far distance the white cone of Mount Fuji rises on the horizon. The vertical Edo ukiyo-e landscape print here is one of the most ambitious in the One Hundred Famous Views, treating an urban ritual as a topographic subject in its own right. The composition combines a virtuosic use of overhead perspective with a fine-grained record of festival objects. Publisher Sakanaya Eikichi issued the design, and an impression is preserved in the Clarence Buckingham Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, where the sheet can be studied as one of the most reproduced festival images of nineteenth-century Edo.