Three People Walking in Snow

Three People Walking in Snow is a landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), an artist whose treatment of weather and season helped define the Edo ukiyo-e landscape print and exerted a lasting influence on Western painters such as Whistler and Van Gogh. Hiroshige's snow scenes are among the most admired moments in his oeuvre, ranging from the iconic Kanbara station of his Hoeido Tokaido to the snow-bound shrines and bridges of his Edo and Kisokaido series. In images like this one, three travelers move through a landscape muffled by snowfall, their cloaked figures providing scale and an emotional center for an otherwise white expanse. The medium of woodblock printing was uniquely suited to such scenes: the keyblock outlines could be left strikingly bare against unprinted paper to convey snow on rooftops and branches, while bokashi gradation in the sky and graded ink in the foreground suggested cold air and falling flakes. The result is a landscape print in which negative space functions as substance and silence becomes pictorial. Preserved at ukiyo-e.org, the image illustrates the depth of Hiroshige's lifelong investigation into the visual conditions of Japanese weather, an investigation that broadened the imaginative range of the landscape print and made winter, in particular, one of the great native subjects of nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock art.