Evening Glow at Ryogoku Bridge (Ryogoku sekisho), from the series "Eight Views of Edo (Edo hakkei)"

An oban from Toyohiro's Eight Views of Edo (Edo hakkei), the series in which he transposed the classical Chinese theme of the Eight Views onto the urban landscape of his own city. Ryogoku Bridge, spanning the Sumida River, was one of the great gathering places of Edo, famous for its summer fireworks, its teahouses, and its theatrical crowds, and the evening glow (sekisho) treatment positions Toyohiro within a long poetic tradition of dusk-as-meditation. The Art Institute of Chicago dates the impression to circa 1804-1818, the same span that produced the prototypes for what Hiroshige would later make canonical in his own Edo landscape series. The atmospheric handling of the print, with its careful gradation of sky color and small figures placed for scale, is one of the clearest demonstrations of why Toyohiro is regarded as Hiroshige's most direct landscape antecedent.