Famous Places in Edo in the Four Seasons (Shiki Koto meisho)
Shiki Koto meisho
About This Series
Famous Places in Edo in the Four Seasons (Shiki Koto meisho) is a smaller, format-distinct Edo cycle by Utagawa Hiroshige whose surviving sheets are generally assigned to the 1830s or 1840s and organized around the four-season pairing that had structured Japanese landscape since classical waka anthologies. Where his various Toto meisho and Koto meisho series presented Edo as an extended catalogue of districts and bridges, the Shiki Koto meisho compressed the city into a more concentrated seasonal anthology, in which each print registered a famous site through the specific weather and observance proper to its season. The format placed less emphasis on topographical breadth than on seasonal mood, with the four-part structure inherited from the medieval shiki-e tradition that had long organized poetry and painting around spring blossoms, summer rains, autumn moon, and winter snow. As a meisho-e designer Hiroshige was at his most refined in handling such calibrations, and the cycle's prints accordingly subordinate documentary specificity to atmospheric effect, with bokashi gradations and figure placement registering season as much as the named locations themselves. The series belongs to the body of mid-career Edo views in which Hiroshige was steadily expanding the city's pictorial repertoire, and it sits between the earlier Toto meisho experiments and the climactic One Hundred Famous Views of Edo of 1856 to 1858. Publishers associated with such Edo cycles in this period included Kawaguchiya, Sanoki, and others active in the meisho-e trade, and individual impressions vary in attribution as the small corpus has been reconstructed by modern scholarship. The Shiki Koto meisho stands as a representative example of how Hiroshige translated the inherited four-season convention into his contemporary city's idiom, and surviving impressions are valued by collectors for the way they distill the larger Edo meisho project into a tighter calendrical frame.
Prints in This Series (2)
Frequently Asked Questions
Famous Places in Edo in the Four Seasons (Shiki Koto meisho) is a smaller, format-distinct Edo cycle by Utagawa Hiroshige whose surviving sheets are generally assigned to the 1830s or 1840s and organized around the four-season pairing that had structured Japanese landscape since classical waka anthologies. Where his various Toto meisho and Koto meisho series presented Edo as an extended catalogue of districts and bridges, the Shiki Koto meisho compressed the city into a more concentrated seasonal anthology, in which each print registered a famous site through the specific weather and observance proper to its season. The format placed less emphasis on topographical breadth than on seasonal mood, with the four-part structure inherited from the medieval shiki-e tradition that had long organized poetry and painting around spring blossoms, summer rains, autumn moon, and winter snow. As a meisho-e designer Hiroshige was at his most refined in handling such calibrations, and the cycle's prints accordingly subordinate documentary specificity to atmospheric effect, with bokashi gradations and figure placement registering season as much as the named locations themselves. The series belongs to the body of mid-career Edo views in which Hiroshige was steadily expanding the city's pictorial repertoire, and it sits between the earlier Toto meisho experiments and the climactic One Hundred Famous Views of Edo of 1856 to 1858. Publishers associated with such Edo cycles in this period included Kawaguchiya, Sanoki, and others active in the meisho-e trade, and individual impressions vary in attribution as the small corpus has been reconstructed by modern scholarship. The Shiki Koto meisho stands as a representative example of how Hiroshige translated the inherited four-season convention into his contemporary city's idiom, and surviving impressions are valued by collectors for the way they distill the larger Edo meisho project into a tighter calendrical frame.
The Famous Places in Edo in the Four Seasons (Shiki Koto meisho) series contains 1 prints, created by Utagawa Hiroshige.
The Famous Places in Edo in the Four Seasons (Shiki Koto meisho) series was created by Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川広重).
We currently have 2 of 1 known prints from the Famous Places in Edo in the Four Seasons (Shiki Koto meisho) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
Want to rate prints from Famous Places in Edo in the Four Seasons (Shiki Koto meisho)?
Sign up to start rating