Tsukudajima from Eitai Bridge, from the series One Hundred Views of Famous Places in Edo

Tsukudajima from Eitai Bridge, dated 1858, is among the final sheets of Utagawa Hiroshige's monumental One Hundred Famous Views of Edo and was published in the year of his death. The view looks down the mouth of the Sumida River from the long span of Eitai Bridge toward the low fishing-island settlement of Tsukudajima, where communities transplanted from the Settsu Province had supplied Edo with whitebait and other delicacies since the early seventeenth century. Hiroshige adopts the dramatic close-up framing characteristic of this last series: massive timber piers of Eitai Bridge cut vertically across the foreground, while sailboats and cargo barges glide through the broad water beyond, with the long horizon of Tsukudajima lying like a low silhouette in the middle distance. The bold cropping, saturated indigo of the river, and clean architectural geometry exerted lasting influence on European artists later acquainted with Edo ukiyo-e through japonisme. As both a vivid piece of Edo townscape documentation and a high-water example of the late landscape print, the work has long been a touchstone of the One Hundred Famous Views, and the Cleveland Museum of Art preserves this impression among its core Hiroshige holdings.