The Origins of the Kinryuzan Temple at Asakusa

Issued in 1845, this landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige takes as its subject the founding legend of Kinryuzan Sensoji, the great Asakusa temple complex that has been the most popular Buddhist pilgrimage site in Edo since the seventeenth century. According to tradition, in the year 628 two fisher brothers, Hinokuma Hamanari and Takenari, drew a small golden image of the bodhisattva Kannon from the waters of the Sumida River, and the temple grew up around that miraculous catch. Hiroshige treats the legend with the muted dignity appropriate to a religious subject, presenting the brothers at the moment of discovery against a softly washed riverbank with reeds, fishing nets, and a still pre-urban skyline. The print is one of a number of works in which Hiroshige documented the religious and historical undercurrents of Edo ukiyo-e sites rather than their contemporary crowds, supplying his audience with the layered backstory of places they walked through every day. The careful registration, the rust-and-blue palette, and the slightly archaic figure style all locate the work within the artist's mid-career production. The Victoria and Albert Museum preserves the impression as part of its substantial holdings of Hiroshige's Asakusa subjects.