View of Nihonbashi Tori-itchome (Nihonbashi Tori-itchome ryakuzu), from the series "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei)"

Utagawa Hiroshige's view of Nihonbashi Tori-itchome, issued in 1858 as part of One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, takes the viewer into the most prosperous commercial street of the shogun's capital. Nihonbashi, the bridge from which all distances in Japan were measured, anchored a dense district of merchant houses, restaurants, and the great kimono emporiums whose tall signboards stretch across the upper register of the composition. Among the businesses identifiable in the print are the celebrated Shirokiya dry-goods store and Sugata-mi, a noted teahouse, captured in the precise lettering that Hiroshige integrated as part of the design. The street below teems with life: porters, palanquin bearers, a procession of musicians dressed for a festival, a young woman shaded by a parasol, and ordinary townspeople going about their errands. The unusually high viewpoint and tight vertical framing focus the eye downward through layered tiled roofs, a structural device that Hiroshige used repeatedly in this final great series of his career and that European artists, notably Vincent van Gogh, would later study and copy. As a working document of late Edo ukiyo-e printmaking and of Edo street life on the eve of modernization, this landscape print is among the most cited in the Buckingham Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago.