View of Tokyo (Shore with Boats)

View of Tokyo (Shore with Boats), preserved in the Harvard Art Museums, is a late or posthumous print bearing the Hiroshige name that records the city under its new Meiji designation as Tokyo. The composition follows the conventions of the Edo ukiyo-e landscape print as redefined by Utagawa Hiroshige in his great surveys of the shogunal capital: a low horizon, a working stretch of waterfront, a foreground occupied by working craft, and a sky given depth through bokashi. The shoreline could be one of several places along the Sumida, the Tokyo Bay front near Tsukiji, or the canalside of Honjo; the print does not insist on identification because by the time it was issued Hiroshige's audience could read such views generically. Boats with patched sails ride at anchor or push slowly along the shore, and a few small figures load or unload cargo at the wharves. The print speaks to the way the Hiroshige studio name persisted into the early Meiji period and to the demand for views that bridged the visual world of Edo and that of the new Tokyo, suggesting continuity of place even as the political order, the foreign presence, and the streets themselves were being transformed.