Distant View of Enoshima from Seven-mile Beach in Kamakura (Kamakura Shichiri-ga-hama yori Enoshima enmi)

This Museum of Fine Arts landscape, titled Kamakura Shichiri-ga-hama yori Enoshima enmi, captures one of the most celebrated coastal views in the Edo-period imagination: Shichiri-ga-hama, the seven-league beach stretching along the Sagami Bay coast between Kamakura and the sacred island of Enoshima. Enoshima, a small tidal island dedicated to the goddess Benzaiten, had been a major pilgrimage destination since the medieval period, and the long sweep of Shichiri-ga-hama with its distant view of the island became one of the standard subjects of Edo-period meisho-e (famous-place pictures), depicted by Hokusai, Hiroshige, Kuniyoshi, and many Utagawa-school designers. Sadatora's composition, dating from the 1830s when the Utagawa school's landscape output was expanding rapidly in response to the popularity of Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1830-32) and the imminent appearance of Hiroshige's famous landscape series, places the viewer on the beach itself with Enoshima rising from the sea in the middle distance. The work belongs to the same atmospheric mode that defined Edo landscape printing in the 1830s, drawing on the newly available Prussian blue pigment that Sadatora had used prominently in his Seven Gods of Fortune series. The MFA holding documents the Utagawa school's broad engagement with the famous-place tradition during the years immediately preceding Hiroshige's commercial supremacy in the genre.