Famous Sights of the Fifty-three Stations
五拾三次名所図会
About This Series
Famous Sights of the Fifty-three Stations (Gojusan tsugi meisho zue, 五拾三次名所図会), conventionally known as the Vertical Tokaido or the Upright Tokaido for its distinctive use of the tate-e oban format, is one of the most ambitious of Utagawa Hiroshige's late reinterpretations of the great highway subject, published by Tsutaya Kichizo in 1855, only three years before the artist's death. The vertical orientation, unusual for landscape since horizontal compositions had long been the convention for fukei-e, allowed Hiroshige to combine an expansive sky and atmospheric upper register with a deep recession into foreground action and a developed near-distance treatment of figures and topography. The choice reflects both the artist's late-career restless experimentation, which would carry through into the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo of 1856 to 1858 with their similarly vertical compositions, and the publisher's commercial calculation that a strikingly reformatted Tokaido would distinguish itself in a crowded field of alternative station sets. The fifty-five sheets of the cycle, comprising the fifty-three stations plus the start and finish points at Nihonbashi and Sanjo Ohashi, present each station with the calibrated atmospheric effects of weather, time of day, and season that had become the central expressive vehicle of Hiroshige's mature meisho-e, while compositional ambition often produces dramatic high horizons, sudden plunges into deep foreground, and strikingly cropped near-distance forms that anticipate the most adventurous designs of the Edo set. As a culminating Tokaido statement late in his career, the Famous Sights stand among the most pictorially adventurous treatments of the subject by any designer. Modern scholarship reads the cycle as evidence of how Hiroshige was reformatting the fukei-e tradition in his final years toward the more dramatic compositional register that would shape his climactic Edo project, and surviving impressions are valued by collectors for the calibration of bokashi work and the technical refinement that the late Edo printers brought to the publication.
Prints in This Series (2)
Frequently Asked Questions
Famous Sights of the Fifty-three Stations (Gojusan tsugi meisho zue, 五拾三次名所図会), conventionally known as the Vertical Tokaido or the Upright Tokaido for its distinctive use of the tate-e oban format, is one of the most ambitious of Utagawa Hiroshige's late reinterpretations of the great highway subject, published by Tsutaya Kichizo in 1855, only three years before the artist's death. The vertical orientation, unusual for landscape since horizontal compositions had long been the convention for fukei-e, allowed Hiroshige to combine an expansive sky and atmospheric upper register with a deep recession into foreground action and a developed near-distance treatment of figures and topography. The choice reflects both the artist's late-career restless experimentation, which would carry through into the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo of 1856 to 1858 with their similarly vertical compositions, and the publisher's commercial calculation that a strikingly reformatted Tokaido would distinguish itself in a crowded field of alternative station sets. The fifty-five sheets of the cycle, comprising the fifty-three stations plus the start and finish points at Nihonbashi and Sanjo Ohashi, present each station with the calibrated atmospheric effects of weather, time of day, and season that had become the central expressive vehicle of Hiroshige's mature meisho-e, while compositional ambition often produces dramatic high horizons, sudden plunges into deep foreground, and strikingly cropped near-distance forms that anticipate the most adventurous designs of the Edo set. As a culminating Tokaido statement late in his career, the Famous Sights stand among the most pictorially adventurous treatments of the subject by any designer. Modern scholarship reads the cycle as evidence of how Hiroshige was reformatting the fukei-e tradition in his final years toward the more dramatic compositional register that would shape his climactic Edo project, and surviving impressions are valued by collectors for the calibration of bokashi work and the technical refinement that the late Edo printers brought to the publication.
The Famous Sights of the Fifty-three Stations series was created by Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川広重), produced between 1855.
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