Ōtsu (Ōtsu)

Otsu, the fifty-third and final station on the Tokaido before Kyoto, lay along the southern shore of Lake Biwa and was famous for Otsu-e, the folk-painting tradition associated with the legendary painter Tosa Matabei. This print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi is part of one of his Tokaido series, in which the great Edo ukiyo-e master of musha-e and warrior prints applied his skills to landscape and meisho-e. Otsu naturally invited references to Otsu-e—paintings of demons, deities, and stock comic types sold to travelers—and Kuniyoshi was unusually well placed to play with this tradition, since his own taste for the grotesque and the supernatural aligned closely with the spirit of the Otsu-e repertoire. The composition combines a recognizable topography of Lake Biwa with a foreground figure or scene, treating the station as a stage rather than a topographic record. The Victoria and Albert Museum impression preserves the firm keyblock and saturated pigments of mature Kuniyoshi. As an Utagawa-school designer trained under Toyokuni I, Kuniyoshi here extends the school's celebrated mastery of figure work into the genre of the station view, producing a print that functions as both a record of a celebrated place and a witty meditation on the popular painting tradition that bore its name.