The Tale of Genji

This 1843 print by Utagawa Hiroshige draws on The Tale of Genji, the eleventh-century courtly romance by Murasaki Shikibu that has supplied Japanese artists with subject matter for nine centuries. Although Hiroshige's reputation rests largely on his treatment of the landscape print and on the great Edo ukiyo-e townscape series, throughout his career he also produced figural compositions on classical themes, often for sophisticated patrons who collected prints alongside paintings. Here Hiroshige stages a quiet interior or garden encounter associated with one of the novel's chapters, working in the elegantly stretched, slightly archaizing figure idiom that Edo printmakers reserved for Heian-period subjects. The palette is restrained and refined, with soft mineral pigments and carefully ruled architectural lines that recall the Tosa-school painting tradition on which such ukiyo-e adaptations leaned. Whatever the specific chapter, the choice of a Genji subject signals the print's address to a literate audience for whom each composition functioned as a visual cue to remembered poetry, perfume, and seasonal mood. The sheet is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, whose Japanese collection preserves a number of these literary excursions in Hiroshige's oeuvre and helps document the breadth of his work beyond the famous meisho-e series.