The Sea off Satta in Suruga Province (Suruga Satta kaijo), from the series "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fuji sanjurokkei)"

The Sea off Satta in Suruga Province is one of the most celebrated sheets from Utagawa Hiroshige's late series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fuji sanjurokkei), published in 1858, the year of the artist's death. Satta Pass on the Tokaido, between Yui and Okitsu, offered one of the most dramatic Fuji prospects of the entire highway. Hiroshige reorganizes the actual topography into something closer to a cosmological diagram: a great curving wave fills the foreground, its crest rising in a fan of foam that almost touches the mountain itself, and Fuji rises in a calm pale blue beyond. The relationship to Hokusai's earlier Great Wave is unmistakable but the temperament is different. Hiroshige is interested less in oceanic terror than in the slow conversation between two great natural forms. As a vertical Edo ukiyo-e landscape print the design exemplifies the technical maturity of late Hiroshige: deep saturated indigo bokashi grading down through the wave, soft pinks and greys along the horizon, and the deliberate restraint of palette that distinguishes his late work. Published by Tsutaya Kichizo, the series was issued posthumously in part. An impression of Satta is held by the Art Institute of Chicago in its Clarence Buckingham Collection, where it can be examined alongside other landscape prints from the artist's final years.