Eight Modern Views of Famous Places in Tokyo of Great Japan (Dai Nippon Tokyo kaika meisho hakkei no zu)

Although the museum catalogue dates this print to 1875, more than a decade after the death of Utagawa Kunisada in 1864, the sheet's clear attribution suggests either a late reissue from blocks originally cut during his lifetime or, more likely, a posthumous publication that incorporated his designs into a Meiji-era series re-marketed under the new name of "Tokyo." The series title, "Eight Modern Views of Famous Places in Tokyo of Great Japan (Dai Nippon Tokyo Kaika Meisho Hakkei no Zu)," reflects the Meiji enthusiasm for civilization-and-enlightenment rhetoric ("kaika") and frames the city's familiar sites within the eight-views convention long established in Edo ukiyo-e through Chinese landscape models such as the Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang. Where Kunisada's own famous-place prints had typically used the topography of Edo as a backdrop for bijin or actors, the present sheet, in keeping with the series logic, places famous Tokyo locations at the center of the composition. The print thus sits at the seam between late Edo ukiyo-e and early Meiji print culture, illustrating how blocks and brands carried Kunisada's authority into a market that was now beginning to absorb Western pictorial conventions. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression as part of its holdings of late Utagawa-school production, where it speaks both to the longevity of Kunisada's name within the Tokyo print trade and to the gradual transformation of yakusha-e and meisho-e in the decades after his death.