The Evening Bell at Miidera (Mii no banshō), from the series "Eight Views in Omi Province (Omi hakkei no uchi)"

The Evening Bell at Miidera is a sheet from Utagawa Hiroshige's Eight Views in Omi Province, dated to 1837 and held by the Art Institute of Chicago (object 25242). The Eight Views of Omi were the Japanese version of the Chinese Xiao and Xiang Eight Views, transplanted to the shores of Lake Biwa and codified in late Heian and medieval poetry; by the early nineteenth century they had become a fixed cycle that ukiyo-e designers and painters returned to repeatedly. The evening bell at Miidera, the great Tendai temple of Onjoji, takes the theme of sound and dusk and ties it to a specific religious site overlooking the lake. Hiroshige's composition places the temple compound on a slope above the water, with the great bell tower visible among the buildings and a long view across Lake Biwa stretching toward distant mountains. The sky is graded from a warm horizon to a deeper upper zone, evoking the close of day. As an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, the sheet is part of Hiroshige's mature engagement with poetic landscape series, and the Omi hakkei stands beside his Eight Views in the Environs of Edo as a key statement of his hakkei work. For collectors, the Miidera bell is one of the most atmospheric images in the cycle and pairs naturally with the more famous Karasaki pine and Seta bridge designs.