Scenes of Famous Places along the Tôkaidô Road
About This Series
Kawanabe Kyosai's "Scenes of Famous Places along the Tokaido Road" (Tokaido meisho fukei, or in some catalogues Tokaido meisho zue) belongs to the long ukiyo-e tradition of the Tokaido meisho-e and constitutes Kyosai's most substantial engagement with the canonical post-station subject. The Tokaido between Edo and Kyoto was the most heavily commemorated of Japan's great roads in nineteenth-century print culture, and after Hiroshige's Hoeido edition of 1833-1834 the subject had become a recurring vehicle for collaborative and individual series across the Utagawa school and beyond. Kyosai's set, which appears to have been a multi-sheet collaborative project of the kind that became common in the late Edo and early Meiji period, gathers views of the principal stations and intermediate landscapes of the road in the loose, energetic brushwork that distinguishes his late style from the more topographically precise mode of Hiroshige; the compositions emphasize atmospheric and human-incident detail over panoramic landscape, and the prints are characterized by the rapid, fluent line work that his Kano training and his Utagawa-school early years had combined to produce. The publication is generally placed in the late 1860s or 1870s, and the project is consistent with Kyosai's wider Meiji-period engagement with the established formats of the Edo print tradition. The prints belong to the same body of late ukiyo-e meisho production through which the Tokaido subject was continually rearticulated for changing audiences across the Edo-Meiji transition. Examples are held in the British Museum, in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and in the principal Japanese collections of nineteenth-century print, with the substantial Kyosai holdings of the Conder bequest providing the most accessible Western reference for the series.
Prints in This Series (57)
Frequently Asked Questions
Kawanabe Kyosai's "Scenes of Famous Places along the Tokaido Road" (Tokaido meisho fukei, or in some catalogues Tokaido meisho zue) belongs to the long ukiyo-e tradition of the Tokaido meisho-e and constitutes Kyosai's most substantial engagement with the canonical post-station subject. The Tokaido between Edo and Kyoto was the most heavily commemorated of Japan's great roads in nineteenth-century print culture, and after Hiroshige's Hoeido edition of 1833-1834 the subject had become a recurring vehicle for collaborative and individual series across the Utagawa school and beyond. Kyosai's set, which appears to have been a multi-sheet collaborative project of the kind that became common in the late Edo and early Meiji period, gathers views of the principal stations and intermediate landscapes of the road in the loose, energetic brushwork that distinguishes his late style from the more topographically precise mode of Hiroshige; the compositions emphasize atmospheric and human-incident detail over panoramic landscape, and the prints are characterized by the rapid, fluent line work that his Kano training and his Utagawa-school early years had combined to produce. The publication is generally placed in the late 1860s or 1870s, and the project is consistent with Kyosai's wider Meiji-period engagement with the established formats of the Edo print tradition. The prints belong to the same body of late ukiyo-e meisho production through which the Tokaido subject was continually rearticulated for changing audiences across the Edo-Meiji transition. Examples are held in the British Museum, in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and in the principal Japanese collections of nineteenth-century print, with the substantial Kyosai holdings of the Conder bequest providing the most accessible Western reference for the series.
The Scenes of Famous Places along the Tôkaidô Road series contains 13 prints, created by Kawanabe Kyosai.
The Scenes of Famous Places along the Tôkaidô Road series was created by Kawanabe Kyosai (河鍋暁斎).
We currently have 57 of 13 known prints from the Scenes of Famous Places along the Tôkaidô Road series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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