Yokkaichi: View of the Mie River, from the series The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō

Yokkaichi was the forty-third post station on the Tokaido, an important port on Ise Bay where pilgrims often turned south toward the great shrines at Ise. In this 1838 landscape print from one of Utagawa Hiroshige's many Tokaido series, the artist takes the Mie River, which flows past Yokkaichi, as his primary subject. The composition is built around a windy day along the river: a traveler clutches his hat as it threatens to blow off the bank, while in the distance a few buildings of the post town and a small bridge mark the human presence in an otherwise wide, open landscape. The Cleveland Museum of Art's impression preserves the cool palette and crisp linework that distinguish early printings of Hiroshige's mid-1830s and 1830s Tokaido sheets. As an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, the Yokkaichi sheet is one of his most economical compositions: a few reeds bent in the wind, a curving river, and a single figure caught in the gust together suggest both the climate and the rhythm of travel along the highway. The print also exemplifies how Hiroshige used unobtrusive narrative incident, in this case the threatened straw hat, to give a recognizable, slightly humorous human anchor to an otherwise atmospheric study of weather and place.