Famous Views of Edo: Kasumigaseki

Catalogued by the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a notional date of 1786, this sheet, signed by Utagawa Kunisada and depicting the Kasumigaseki district of Edo, must in fact belong to the artist's nineteenth-century career. Kasumigaseki was one of the most celebrated viewpoints in Edo ukiyo-e, a slope on the high city that descended toward the bay and that on clear days afforded a sweeping view of Edo's waterscape, the rooftops of daimyo residences, and, on the horizon, the unmistakable cone of Mount Fuji. Like his contemporaries Hokusai and Hiroshige, Kunisada periodically engaged the famous-place (meisho-e) genre, though he typically introduced figures, often elegant women, into the foreground so that the topography functioned as a setting for fashionable life rather than as a pure landscape. The present print follows that pattern: a contemporary beauty (or pair of beauties) stands atop the slope at Kasumigaseki, with the topography of the city sketched behind, allowing the print to satisfy simultaneously the demands of bijinga and meisho-e. Kunisada was a master of integrating figure and ground in this way, balancing the elaborately patterned costume of the foreground figure against the more restrained register of the landscape. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves this impression within its broad collection of Edo ukiyo-e, where it stands as a useful counterweight to the more familiar pure-landscape treatments of Kasumigaseki and demonstrates the breadth of Kunisada's engagement with Edo's urban geography.