Woman viewing cherry blossoms, from an unidentified harimaze set

Woman viewing cherry blossoms, from an unidentified harimaze set, is a Harvard Art Museums fragment representing the harimaze format, in which several small compositions were printed together on a single sheet to be cut apart by the buyer. While many harimaze designs by Utagawa Hiroshige consist of small Edo ukiyo-e landscape prints, this particular vignette is figural: a young woman, dressed in a kimono appropriate to spring, stands beneath a flowering cherry branch and gazes upward at the blossoms. The composition is small enough to read at a glance, and would have been printed alongside several other vignettes, possibly other seasonal subjects, on the same sheet. Hiroshige's contribution to the harimaze format lay in his ability to compress a full pictorial idea into a few square inches without losing the compositional logic of his larger prints: the cherry tree is shown in its characteristic arched mass against the empty paper sky, and the figure is placed off-center so that the blossoms have room to dominate. The fragment is a useful witness to the print culture of late Edo, in which Hiroshige's name was attached not only to monumental meisho series but to small ephemeral formats designed for inexpensive, casual collection.