Tsuchiyama

This nishiki-e (color woodblock print) by Utagawa Yoshitsuya, dated to the fourth month of 1859, is held by the Minneapolis Institute of Art (accession number P.75.51.176). The print depicts Tsuchiyama, the forty-ninth station along the Tōkaidō highway connecting Edo and Kyoto, a celebrated stopping-place that had been a standard subject of Japanese landscape and meisho-e tradition since at least Hiroshige's first Tōkaidō series of the 1830s. The published dimensions are 32.7 by 22 cm in image area, consistent with a vertical chūban or modified ōban format used for late-Edo series prints. The publisher recorded by the Minneapolis Institute of Art is Gifuya Seishichi, an active Bakumatsu Edo printer who produced many of Yoshitsuya's commercial sheets. The print belongs to Yoshitsuya's broader engagement with late-Edo series production and demonstrates that, despite his reputation as a warrior-print specialist, he was fluent in the more conventional Tōkaidō-station and meisho-e idioms that the Utagawa school continued to cultivate in the closing decades of Edo print culture. The print is preserved in the Minneapolis Institute of Art's substantial collection of nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock prints.