Famous Places in the Eastern Capital
About This Series
Famous Places in the Eastern Capital (Toto meisho) is the umbrella title under which Utagawa Hiroshige produced several distinct sets of Edo views from the early 1830s onward, predating and then running parallel to his later Koto meisho and One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Toto, the eastern capital, was the literary name for Edo that distinguished it from Kyoto and lent the seemingly prosaic subject of city views the gravity of a classical meisho-zukushi. The earliest Toto meisho horizontal oban set, published by Kawaguchiya Shozo around 1831 to 1832, established the formula by which Hiroshige would shape the rest of his Edo career, organizing the city into a serial roster of districts, bridges, riversides, and shrine grounds in which atmospheric effect and seasonal observation carried as much weight as topographical record. Subsequent series under the same title were issued by Sanoki, Kikakudo, and other Edo publishers across the 1830s and 1840s, each varying in format, count, and emphasis but sharing the meisho-e premise of presenting Edo to its own residents as a worthy subject of contemplative landscape. As a designer who had only recently emerged from the figure-print apprenticeship of the Utagawa school under Toyohiro, Hiroshige used the Toto meisho format to develop the low horizon, modulated sky, and quietly populated foreground that would become his signature contribution to fukei-e. The genre of meisho-e was venerable, with antecedents in Edo guidebooks and the topographical work of Hokusai, but Hiroshige's particular gift lay in subordinating documentary specificity to mood, so that even a familiar bridge or shrine reads as much through weather and time of day as through location. Modern scholarship treats the various Toto meisho sets as a foundational laboratory for the landscape vocabulary that would mature in the 1850s, and surviving impressions are valued by collectors as testimony to the artist's formative engagement with the city he would spend the rest of his career representing.
Prints in This Series (13)
Frequently Asked Questions
Famous Places in the Eastern Capital (Toto meisho) is the umbrella title under which Utagawa Hiroshige produced several distinct sets of Edo views from the early 1830s onward, predating and then running parallel to his later Koto meisho and One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Toto, the eastern capital, was the literary name for Edo that distinguished it from Kyoto and lent the seemingly prosaic subject of city views the gravity of a classical meisho-zukushi. The earliest Toto meisho horizontal oban set, published by Kawaguchiya Shozo around 1831 to 1832, established the formula by which Hiroshige would shape the rest of his Edo career, organizing the city into a serial roster of districts, bridges, riversides, and shrine grounds in which atmospheric effect and seasonal observation carried as much weight as topographical record. Subsequent series under the same title were issued by Sanoki, Kikakudo, and other Edo publishers across the 1830s and 1840s, each varying in format, count, and emphasis but sharing the meisho-e premise of presenting Edo to its own residents as a worthy subject of contemplative landscape. As a designer who had only recently emerged from the figure-print apprenticeship of the Utagawa school under Toyohiro, Hiroshige used the Toto meisho format to develop the low horizon, modulated sky, and quietly populated foreground that would become his signature contribution to fukei-e. The genre of meisho-e was venerable, with antecedents in Edo guidebooks and the topographical work of Hokusai, but Hiroshige's particular gift lay in subordinating documentary specificity to mood, so that even a familiar bridge or shrine reads as much through weather and time of day as through location. Modern scholarship treats the various Toto meisho sets as a foundational laboratory for the landscape vocabulary that would mature in the 1850s, and surviving impressions are valued by collectors as testimony to the artist's formative engagement with the city he would spend the rest of his career representing.
The Famous Places in the Eastern Capital series contains 1 prints, created by Utagawa Hiroshige.
The Famous Places in the Eastern Capital series was created by Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川広重).
We currently have 13 of 1 known prints from the Famous Places in the Eastern Capital series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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