True View of the Foreign Buildings along the Kaigandōri Seen from the Yokohama Wharves (Yokohama hatoba yori kaigandōri ijinkan no shinzu)

True View of the Foreign Buildings along the Kaigandori Seen from the Yokohama Wharves, dated 1875 in the Harvard Art Museums catalogue, is a late example of the Yokohama-e print, a subgenre that grew directly out of Utagawa Hiroshige's Edo ukiyo-e landscape print tradition and adapted it to the new treaty port. The Hiroshige name carried by such prints belongs to one of the artists who used the studio name after the death of the first Hiroshige in 1858; by the 1870s the second and third generations were actively documenting the foreign settlement at Yokohama for an audience that wanted to see for itself what the new Meiji world looked like. The composition takes a sweeping view from the wharves: shipping in the foreground, the broad bund along the Kaigandori in the middle distance, and a row of brick and stone foreign buildings, ijinkan, ranged behind. Steamers, flags of multiple nations, and Western-style street lamps register the new commercial reality. The print preserves the panoramic, low-altitude format of late Edo meisho prints while substituting brick walls for tiled roofs and steamships for sailing junks. Its presence in the Harvard collection is a reminder that the Hiroshige line of designers continued well into the Meiji period, applying inherited landscape conventions to subjects that the founder of the lineage could never have imagined.