Tsushima Province: Clear Evening on the Coast (Tsushima, kaigan yubare), from the series "Famous Places in the Sixty-odd Provinces (Rokujuyoshu meisho zue)"

Tsushima Province: Clear Evening on the Coast (Tsushima, kaigan yubare) is an 1856 landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige, drawn from his ambitious Rokujuyoshu meisho zue, or Famous Places in the Sixty-odd Provinces. Designed in vertical oban format, the series guided armchair travelers across the entire map of Edo-period Japan, with each sheet condensing a distant province into a single memorable image. Tsushima, the remote island domain between Kyushu and the Korean peninsula, posed a particular challenge: Hiroshige almost certainly never visited and instead synthesized written gazetteers and earlier illustrations into a coherent scene. The result is a luminous coastal view in which fishing boats ride a calm sea beneath a high, clearing sky. A long spit of land and a sweeping pine-clad shore frame the composition, while figures gather salt or mend nets at the water's edge. The bokashi gradient above the horizon, printed with carefully wiped pigment, gives the print its 'clear evening' atmosphere, suggesting the moment when rain has just passed and the air sharpens before dusk. Edo ukiyo-e publishers prized this kind of poetic weather effect, and Hiroshige's mastery of it helped distinguish his landscape print designs from those of his many rivals. Within the Rokujuyoshu series the Tsushima sheet stands among the more dreamlike entries, valued today both for its formal balance and for its role in shaping mainland Japanese perceptions of a province most viewers would never see. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this impression, where it offers a clean record of Hiroshige's late provincial views.