Tonosawa' from the series 'Depictions of the Seven Hot Springs of Hakone'

Tonosawa, from the series "Depictions of the Seven Hot Springs of Hakone," is an 1847 woodblock print by Utagawa Hiroshige. The Hakone hot-springs district, in the mountains of Sagami Province along the Tokaido, was one of the most heavily traveled stretches of the highway and a popular destination in its own right for Edo and provincial visitors seeking the medicinal benefits of its onsen. Tonosawa was one of the seven named onsen settlements, set deep in the gorge along the Hayakawa river. In Hiroshige's design, the village clusters on terraced slopes, with thatched inn roofs, footbridges, and stone steps fitted into a steep landscape of pines, maples, and rushing water. The artist uses his characteristic tonal handling, deep greens for the surrounding forest, softer blue gradations for the river, and warm earth tones for paths and rooflines, to evoke not only the visual character of the place but also the cool, damp microclimate that defined a Hakone visit. This impression is held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where it sits within a substantial nineteenth-century Japanese print holding. As an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, Tonosawa shows Hiroshige extending his interest in the Tokaido into a more focused thematic series. The work fits naturally beside his various Tokaido editions and reinforces his role as the leading visual chronicler of the road and its many side-routes for nineteenth-century viewers.