The Timberyard, Fukagawa Ikiyo-e

The Timberyard, Fukagawa, recorded on ukiyo-e.org, is one of Utagawa Hiroshige's many treatments of the Fukagawa district on the east bank of the Sumida, where stacks of logs and lumber yards formed one of the most distinctive cityscapes in Edo. Fukagawa Kiba, the timberyard, supplied the building trade of the entire city; piles of logs lay in canals and basins waiting to be drawn up and sawn, and the area's character was inseparable from the lumber trade. Hiroshige used the site in his One Hundred Famous Views of Edo and in earlier meisho series, finding in the regular geometry of stacked logs a quietly modern subject for the Edo ukiyo-e landscape print. The present sheet appears to belong to that family of designs. A canal cuts across the foreground; logs are arranged in long parallel piles; a small bridge or footbridge crosses one of the basins; behind, low-roofed workshops and the spires of distant temples rise toward a softly graded sky. Workers and passersby give human scale without becoming the subject. The composition is characteristic of Hiroshige's late preference for emphatically geometric arrangements of mundane infrastructure, treating the lumberyard with the same dignity he had granted to the bridges and temples of central Edo.