Landscape in Mist (Muchu no sansui), from an untitled series of landscapes

From an untitled series of landscapes by Utagawa Kunisada, this 1827 design - "Landscape in Mist (Muchū no sansui)" - is among the artist's relatively rare pure landscape prints, a category more often associated with his contemporaries Hokusai and Hiroshige. Kunisada's landscape work shows him absorbing the same sansui (mountain-water) idiom that Chinese-influenced Edo painting had refined for centuries, but rendered for the multi-block color print rather than the brush. The treatment of mist (muchū) takes advantage of the woodblock medium's capacity for graduated bokashi, where the printer wipes the block with diminishing pigment to produce soft transitions. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the impression (artwork 24923). For a designer remembered primarily for yakusha-e, the landscape sheets are valuable evidence of Kunisada's range and his engagement with the wider Edo ukiyo-e market in the 1820s, before Hiroshige's "Tōkaidō" of the early 1830s decisively reorganized the landscape genre. The untitled status of the series leaves room for scholarly attention, but the design itself is a confident demonstration of how the mature Utagawa workshop could produce evocative landscape ukiyo-e parallel to its dominant figural lines.