THIRTY-SIX VIEWS OF YEDO "OCHANOMIZU"

The Ochanomizu sheet from a "Thirty-Six Views of Yedo" series, preserved at the Harvard Art Museums, shows Utagawa Hiroshige working again at a site that had become a touchstone of Edo ukiyo-e topography. Ochanomizu was the dramatic gorge cut through the bluff between Hongō and Surugadai when the Kanda River was rerouted as part of Edo's flood-control works in the seventeenth century. By Hiroshige's day it had become a celebrated landscape feature, prized for the way its narrow channel, steep wooded slopes, and elegant aqueducts looked entirely unlike the surrounding flat city. In this design the artist takes a high oblique view: the river runs diagonally across the sheet, lined by pines and the timbered slopes of the cut, while a wooden footbridge or aqueduct spans the gorge at an angle. Small boats and figures on the banks indicate scale, but the picture's real subject is the rush of water through a deep, green channel. The printer's use of graded blue (bokashi) in the river and softer washes in the foliage produces the cool, slightly humid mood appropriate to the site, and the composition relies on overlapping diagonals rather than a strict perspective grid. As a landscape print in a city-view series, it neatly illustrates the way Hiroshige could find, even within the densest districts of Edo, dramatic natural-feeling scenery worth presenting alongside his more rural and travel-related work.