THIRTY-SIX VIEWS OF YEDO, "SEKIYA NO SATO"

The Sekiya no Sato sheet from a "Thirty-Six Views of Yedo" series, held at the Harvard Art Museums, is among the more rustic compositions in Utagawa Hiroshige's late Edo ukiyo-e production. Sekiya was a riverside hamlet at the bend of the Sumida north of Edo, near present-day Higashi-Mukōjima, and had long been associated in poetry with crossings, ferries, and the autumnal mood of an open landscape just outside the city. Hiroshige takes a low vantage, placing thatched roofs, a winding path, and a few willow trees in the foreground; beyond them the Sumida River opens into the middle distance, with small boats and a far bank suggested in cool washes. The palette is dominated by greens, blue-greys, and soft sandy yellows, and the printer's bokashi gradations in the sky and water produce the slightly humid, hushed atmosphere typical of riverside Edo. Human activity is reduced to a handful of figures—farmers, perhaps a traveler on the path—so that the scene reads less as an urban view than as a glimpse of rural life on the city's periphery. As one of thirty-six views of Edo, the print enacts the series convention that the shogunal capital contained, alongside its great commercial districts, pockets of village geography that could be presented as proper landscape print subjects in their own right; this Sekiya sheet typifies that quieter, more pastoral side of Hiroshige's vision of Edo.