The Whirlpools of Awa

The Whirlpools of Awa is a tour de force of the late landscape print mode that Utagawa Hiroshige perfected in the mid-1850s. The subject is the Naruto Strait between Awaji Island and Awa Province on Shikoku, where the meeting of Pacific tides and the Inland Sea generates some of the largest tidal whirlpools in the world, especially dramatic at the change of the tide. In this 1857 vertical triptych Hiroshige stacks three oban sheets to span the full height of the strait, allowing the eye to fall from the headland and pine-clad cliffs at the top, down across the boiling foam of the central whirlpools, and onward to a fleet of small boats threading the safer outer water below. The carved spiraling lines of the eddies, set off against deep gradated blues, are among the most assured passages of woodblock carving in Edo ukiyo-e. Composed in the same period as his great snow, moon, and flower vertical triptychs, the work belongs to a small group of late landscape masterpieces in which Hiroshige left the comfortable horizontal oban for ambitious wall-sized arrangements meant to compete with painting. The Cleveland Museum of Art preserves a complete impression of this triptych, recognized as a key benchmark of Hiroshige's mature style.