Six Famous Views

This 1770s color woodblock print at the Art Institute of Chicago belongs to a sequence of famous views (meisho-e) by Toyoharu titled 'Six Famous Views.' Famous-view prints were one of the staple categories of the Edo market, and each design in such a series typically presented a single celebrated location, often in or near Edo, in a compact composition that combined landscape, architecture, and figures. The print is part of the broader effort by Toyoharu, and by his contemporaries, to translate the established literary and pictorial canon of meisho (renowned places) into the medium of full-color woodblock print. Because Toyoharu had already trained himself in perspective construction through his uki-e projects, his meisho-e tend to feel more spatially organised than those of artists who came to landscape from a flatter, decorative tradition. The series is therefore a useful intermediate step between Toyoharu's experimental perspective prints and the great nineteenth-century Utagawa-school landscape series by Hiroshige and Kunisada that drew on his lineage.