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

Dated 1827 and now in the Art Institute of Chicago, this misty landscape by Utagawa Toyokuni is part of an untitled series of landscapes that occupies a small but distinctive corner of his Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) output. Toyokuni built his career on [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e), but during the 1820s the wider market for landscape prints expanded rapidly under the influence of Hokusai and the early work of Hiroshige, and Toyokuni evidently joined the broader experimentation. The sheet shows mountains and water dissolving into bands of mist, with foreground motifs more sharply outlined and the distance reduced to a few tonal gradations. The composition borrows the literati taste for atmospheric understatement and arranges its elements so that the eye drifts gradually upward through the picture plane. Compared to his theatrical work, the print is quiet, almost abstract in its handling of negative space, and demonstrates how the Utagawa school's command of color block printing could be turned to entirely different expressive ends. The Art Institute's record places the work within a small group of related landscapes, suggesting it was designed to be appreciated in sequence. For modern viewers, the sheet complicates the standard picture of Toyokuni as exclusively a designer of kabuki imagery and shows how alert he remained to shifts in collector taste during the final years of his career.