Famous Places in Edo (Koto meisho)
Koto meisho
About This Series
Famous Places in Edo (Koto meisho) is one of the umbrella titles under which Utagawa Hiroshige published Edo views in the late 1830s and 1840s, and the designation overlaps with related cycles titled Toto meisho and Shiki Koto meisho. Koto, the eastern capital, was an alternative classicizing name for Edo paralleling Toto and lent the meisho-e subject the gravity of classical poetic association. The Koto meisho prints organize the city into a serial roster of districts, bridges, riverbanks, shrine grounds, and seasonal observances in which atmospheric effect and time-of-day notation carry as much weight as topographical record. Surviving sheets across the various Koto meisho sets show Hiroshige working in formats including oban yoko-e and chuban, with publishers including Sanoki, Kawaguchiya, and others active in the Edo meisho-e trade. As a fukei-e designer who was steadily expanding the pictorial repertoire of his home city, Hiroshige used the Koto meisho format to refine the low horizon, modulated sky, and quietly populated foreground that would mature in the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo of 1856 to 1858. The Koto meisho cycles belong to the broader Edo meisho-e project that occupied much of his career and that supplied the city's residents with images of their own neighborhoods translated into the contemplative idiom of classical landscape. Genre conventions of meisho-e demanded both topographical fidelity, sufficient that informed viewers could recognize each site, and atmospheric sophistication, with each print calibrated to a particular season, hour, and weather. Modern scholarship treats the Koto meisho corpus as a substantial intermediate phase between Hiroshige's early Toto meisho experiments and his late Edo masterpiece, and surviving impressions are valued by collectors as testimony to the continuous evolution of his Edo vocabulary across more than two decades of sustained production.
Prints in This Series (3)
Frequently Asked Questions
Famous Places in Edo (Koto meisho) is one of the umbrella titles under which Utagawa Hiroshige published Edo views in the late 1830s and 1840s, and the designation overlaps with related cycles titled Toto meisho and Shiki Koto meisho. Koto, the eastern capital, was an alternative classicizing name for Edo paralleling Toto and lent the meisho-e subject the gravity of classical poetic association. The Koto meisho prints organize the city into a serial roster of districts, bridges, riverbanks, shrine grounds, and seasonal observances in which atmospheric effect and time-of-day notation carry as much weight as topographical record. Surviving sheets across the various Koto meisho sets show Hiroshige working in formats including oban yoko-e and chuban, with publishers including Sanoki, Kawaguchiya, and others active in the Edo meisho-e trade. As a fukei-e designer who was steadily expanding the pictorial repertoire of his home city, Hiroshige used the Koto meisho format to refine the low horizon, modulated sky, and quietly populated foreground that would mature in the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo of 1856 to 1858. The Koto meisho cycles belong to the broader Edo meisho-e project that occupied much of his career and that supplied the city's residents with images of their own neighborhoods translated into the contemplative idiom of classical landscape. Genre conventions of meisho-e demanded both topographical fidelity, sufficient that informed viewers could recognize each site, and atmospheric sophistication, with each print calibrated to a particular season, hour, and weather. Modern scholarship treats the Koto meisho corpus as a substantial intermediate phase between Hiroshige's early Toto meisho experiments and his late Edo masterpiece, and surviving impressions are valued by collectors as testimony to the continuous evolution of his Edo vocabulary across more than two decades of sustained production.
The Famous Places in Edo (Koto meisho) series contains 2 prints, created by Utagawa Hiroshige.
The Famous Places in Edo (Koto meisho) series was created by Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川広重).
We currently have 3 of 2 known prints from the Famous Places in Edo (Koto meisho) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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