View from Mount Kiyosumi in Awa Province

Dated 1852 and held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, View from Mount Kiyosumi in Awa Province is an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print in which Utagawa Hiroshige looks out from one of the great sacred mountains on the Bōsō Peninsula in modern Chiba Prefecture. Mount Kiyosumi (Kiyosumi-yama) was associated with the Tendai foundation Kiyosumi-dera, where Nichiren is traditionally said to have first proclaimed his teachings; by Hiroshige's day it was a recognized pilgrimage and scenic site, prized for its prospect across the wooded slopes of Awa down toward the Pacific. The print uses a high vantage: the foreground is given over to the wooded ridge, with the suggestion of a temple roof or path among large trees, while the middle distance opens out across a sequence of lower hills until the eye finally meets the sea. Hiroshige uses graded blue washes to suggest the depth and recession of the landscape, and a few small figures along the trail establish scale and the mountain's role as a pilgrimage destination. The color scheme—dense greens for the immediate slope, softer blue-greens further off, and a pale strip of sky—gives the design the layered, atmospheric quality of his mature provincial views. As a landscape print made in the busy final decade of his career, the Victoria and Albert sheet shows Hiroshige looking outside Edo to record a specific religious mountain in the broader geography of Tokugawa Japan.