The Ide Jewel River in Yamashiro Province (Yamashiro Ide), from the series "Six Jewel Rivers in the Various Provinces (Shokoku Mu Tamagawa)"

Utagawa Hiroshige's Ide Jewel River in Yamashiro Province belongs to the series Six Jewel Rivers in the Various Provinces (Shokoku Mu Tamagawa), in which the artist gathered the six Tamagawa, or Jewel Rivers, dispersed across Japan that classical poets had long celebrated for their clarity and beauty. The Ide Tamagawa, south of Kyoto, was associated with kerria roses (yamabuki) and frogs in waka poetry stretching back to the Heian period, and Hiroshige weaves these literary references through his 1857 landscape print. A rustic bridge of plank and woven branches arches across the shallow stream; a single rider on horseback and an attendant on foot cross it, while clumps of yellow kerria spill down the embankment and a heron stands in the reeds at the foreground. The dense vegetation, lush blues, and refined gradations of the water identify the work as a late mature design in the Edo ukiyo-e poetic landscape vein. The use of vertical oban format, with subject matter borrowed from classical waka, distinguishes this series from Hiroshige's more documentary travel sets and aligns it with the literati taste of mid-nineteenth-century Edo collectors. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this impression in its Clarence Buckingham Collection of Japanese prints.