Eight Views of Omi Province (Omi hakkei no uchi)
Omi hakkei no uchi
About This Series
Eight Views of Omi Province (Omi hakkei no uchi) is Utagawa Hiroshige's adaptation of one of the most venerable topographical formats in East Asian landscape, the eight-view set built on the Chinese Xiao-Xiang model and naturalized to Japan through medieval poetry and painting around the southern shore of Lake Biwa. The canonical Omi eight, including such conventions as the autumn moon at Ishiyama, evening snow at Hira, and evening bell at Mii Temple, had been illustrated for centuries before Hiroshige took them up, and his task in this series, issued in oban yoko-e format around 1834 with publication associated with Eikyudo Tomekichi, was less the discovery of new sites than the translation of an inherited literary cycle into the atmospheric meisho-e idiom he was simultaneously developing for Edo and the Tokaido. The set adheres closely to the prescribed scenes and their seasonal and temporal associations, but Hiroshige's handling foregrounds weather as the principal expressive vehicle, with each sheet calibrated to a particular hour of day and quality of light. Bokashi gradations across the upper sky and the lake's surface carry mood rather than topography, and figures are reduced to small staffage that registers human scale without distracting from the landscape's contemplative tone. As one of the earliest mature landscape series of his career, the Omi hakkei stands alongside his Tokaido sets as evidence that he had absorbed the conventions of fukei-e and was prepared to apply them across both inherited classical material and contemporary travel subjects. The series belongs to the Tenpo-era flowering of landscape print culture, when Hokusai's success with the Thirty-six Views of Fuji had established a market for serial fukei-e, and Hiroshige's contribution distinguished itself by the literary refinement it brought to a subject already saturated with poetic association. Modern scholarship reads the Omi hakkei as a key transitional work between the artist's early figure prints and the great Edo and Tokaido series of his maturity, and surviving impressions are valued for the calibration of bokashi work that early printings preserve most fully.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Eight Views of Omi Province (Omi hakkei no uchi) is Utagawa Hiroshige's adaptation of one of the most venerable topographical formats in East Asian landscape, the eight-view set built on the Chinese Xiao-Xiang model and naturalized to Japan through medieval poetry and painting around the southern shore of Lake Biwa. The canonical Omi eight, including such conventions as the autumn moon at Ishiyama, evening snow at Hira, and evening bell at Mii Temple, had been illustrated for centuries before Hiroshige took them up, and his task in this series, issued in oban yoko-e format around 1834 with publication associated with Eikyudo Tomekichi, was less the discovery of new sites than the translation of an inherited literary cycle into the atmospheric meisho-e idiom he was simultaneously developing for Edo and the Tokaido. The set adheres closely to the prescribed scenes and their seasonal and temporal associations, but Hiroshige's handling foregrounds weather as the principal expressive vehicle, with each sheet calibrated to a particular hour of day and quality of light. Bokashi gradations across the upper sky and the lake's surface carry mood rather than topography, and figures are reduced to small staffage that registers human scale without distracting from the landscape's contemplative tone. As one of the earliest mature landscape series of his career, the Omi hakkei stands alongside his Tokaido sets as evidence that he had absorbed the conventions of fukei-e and was prepared to apply them across both inherited classical material and contemporary travel subjects. The series belongs to the Tenpo-era flowering of landscape print culture, when Hokusai's success with the Thirty-six Views of Fuji had established a market for serial fukei-e, and Hiroshige's contribution distinguished itself by the literary refinement it brought to a subject already saturated with poetic association. Modern scholarship reads the Omi hakkei as a key transitional work between the artist's early figure prints and the great Edo and Tokaido series of his maturity, and surviving impressions are valued for the calibration of bokashi work that early printings preserve most fully.
The Eight Views of Omi Province (Omi hakkei no uchi) series contains 1 prints, created by Utagawa Hiroshige.
The Eight Views of Omi Province (Omi hakkei no uchi) series was created by Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川広重).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Eight Views of Omi Province (Omi hakkei no uchi) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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