Reishō Tōkaidō
隷書東海道
About This Series
Reishō Tōkaidō (隷書東海道), so named for the clerical-script (reisho) calligraphy in which its title cartouches were brushed, is one of the principal alternative Tokaido cycles that Utagawa Hiroshige produced in the late 1840s and early 1850s, in this case issued by Marusei (Maruseiya Jinpachi) and dated approximately 1847 to 1852. By the late 1840s Hiroshige had been working the Tokaido subject for more than fifteen years, and the success of his Hoeido set of 1833 to 1834 had established a continuing market for new fifty-three station cycles that publishers competed to commission. The Reisho Tokaido is among the more pictorially ambitious of these later sets, presenting each station in the horizontal oban format that had become standard for the subject but with compositional choices distinct from those of the Hoeido and other earlier cycles. Hiroshige's atmospheric vocabulary, by this point thoroughly mature, registers the seasonal and meteorological conditions of each station with calibrated bokashi gradations across upper sky and modulated tonality across foregrounds, while figural staffage carries the social use of the highway through the small dramas of travelers, porters, and roadside workers. The clerical-script titling that gives the set its modern name was a deliberate calligraphic choice meant to lend the cycle a classicizing dignity beyond the more standard kana and standard-script cartouches of other Tokaido sets, and it marks the publisher's commercial positioning of the cycle for a connoisseur audience that prized such refinements. The series belongs to Hiroshige's mature fukei-e production in the period before his late great Edo project, and modern scholarship treats it as evidence of how the artist continued to revisit and reinterpret the Tokaido subject across his career. Surviving impressions of the Reisho Tokaido are valued by collectors for the calibration of bokashi work that early printings preserve most fully and as a comparative document against the more famous Hoeido and Gyosho sets, the various Tokaido cycles together constituting one of the longest sustained engagements with a single landscape subject in the history of the print medium.
Prints in This Series (2)
Frequently Asked Questions
Reishō Tōkaidō (隷書東海道), so named for the clerical-script (reisho) calligraphy in which its title cartouches were brushed, is one of the principal alternative Tokaido cycles that Utagawa Hiroshige produced in the late 1840s and early 1850s, in this case issued by Marusei (Maruseiya Jinpachi) and dated approximately 1847 to 1852. By the late 1840s Hiroshige had been working the Tokaido subject for more than fifteen years, and the success of his Hoeido set of 1833 to 1834 had established a continuing market for new fifty-three station cycles that publishers competed to commission. The Reisho Tokaido is among the more pictorially ambitious of these later sets, presenting each station in the horizontal oban format that had become standard for the subject but with compositional choices distinct from those of the Hoeido and other earlier cycles. Hiroshige's atmospheric vocabulary, by this point thoroughly mature, registers the seasonal and meteorological conditions of each station with calibrated bokashi gradations across upper sky and modulated tonality across foregrounds, while figural staffage carries the social use of the highway through the small dramas of travelers, porters, and roadside workers. The clerical-script titling that gives the set its modern name was a deliberate calligraphic choice meant to lend the cycle a classicizing dignity beyond the more standard kana and standard-script cartouches of other Tokaido sets, and it marks the publisher's commercial positioning of the cycle for a connoisseur audience that prized such refinements. The series belongs to Hiroshige's mature fukei-e production in the period before his late great Edo project, and modern scholarship treats it as evidence of how the artist continued to revisit and reinterpret the Tokaido subject across his career. Surviving impressions of the Reisho Tokaido are valued by collectors for the calibration of bokashi work that early printings preserve most fully and as a comparative document against the more famous Hoeido and Gyosho sets, the various Tokaido cycles together constituting one of the longest sustained engagements with a single landscape subject in the history of the print medium.
The Reishō Tōkaidō series was created by Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川広重), produced between 1847–1852.
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