Famous Places in the Various Provinces (Shokoku meisho)
Shokoku meisho
About This Series
Famous Places in the Various Provinces (Shokoku meisho) is the umbrella designation under which Utagawa Hiroshige produced a body of provincial landscape prints that extended the meisho-e project beyond the Edo and Tokaido work for which he was best known. The shokoku, or various provinces, designation invited a topographical sweep across the Japanese archipelago, gathering famous sites from the coastal road of the San'yo, the inland mountains of Shinano and Kai, the snow country of Echigo, the southern reaches of Kii and Settsu, and other regions through which Hiroshige himself had only partly traveled. The series and its associated cycles were issued by various Edo publishers across the 1840s and into the 1850s, with format and count varying among them and with Hiroshige drawing on existing guidebook illustrations, regional gazetteers, and traveler reports to supply the topographical notation for sites he had not seen firsthand. As a fukei-e designer he treated the provincial subject in the atmospheric idiom he had developed for the Tokaido and for Edo, subordinating documentary specificity to weather and time-of-day effects and reducing figures to small staffage that registered human scale and the social use of each landscape. The Shokoku meisho project belongs to the period after the Tenpo reforms when Hiroshige's reputation as the leading meisho-e designer was firmly established and publishers were investing in landscape titles confident that the market would support them. Modern scholarship reads the provincial series collectively as evidence of how thoroughly Hiroshige had naturalized the fukei-e vocabulary to a national rather than a strictly urban or highway scale, and as documentation of how the Edo print industry constructed a unified pictorial Japan out of locally specific traditions. Surviving impressions from these provincial sets are valued by collectors particularly for the regional sites that lay outside the canonical meisho roster of the Tokaido and the imperial capital and that would otherwise have escaped the late-Edo print record.
Prints in This Series (15)
Frequently Asked Questions
Famous Places in the Various Provinces (Shokoku meisho) is the umbrella designation under which Utagawa Hiroshige produced a body of provincial landscape prints that extended the meisho-e project beyond the Edo and Tokaido work for which he was best known. The shokoku, or various provinces, designation invited a topographical sweep across the Japanese archipelago, gathering famous sites from the coastal road of the San'yo, the inland mountains of Shinano and Kai, the snow country of Echigo, the southern reaches of Kii and Settsu, and other regions through which Hiroshige himself had only partly traveled. The series and its associated cycles were issued by various Edo publishers across the 1840s and into the 1850s, with format and count varying among them and with Hiroshige drawing on existing guidebook illustrations, regional gazetteers, and traveler reports to supply the topographical notation for sites he had not seen firsthand. As a fukei-e designer he treated the provincial subject in the atmospheric idiom he had developed for the Tokaido and for Edo, subordinating documentary specificity to weather and time-of-day effects and reducing figures to small staffage that registered human scale and the social use of each landscape. The Shokoku meisho project belongs to the period after the Tenpo reforms when Hiroshige's reputation as the leading meisho-e designer was firmly established and publishers were investing in landscape titles confident that the market would support them. Modern scholarship reads the provincial series collectively as evidence of how thoroughly Hiroshige had naturalized the fukei-e vocabulary to a national rather than a strictly urban or highway scale, and as documentation of how the Edo print industry constructed a unified pictorial Japan out of locally specific traditions. Surviving impressions from these provincial sets are valued by collectors particularly for the regional sites that lay outside the canonical meisho roster of the Tokaido and the imperial capital and that would otherwise have escaped the late-Edo print record.
The Famous Places in the Various Provinces (Shokoku meisho) series contains 1 prints, created by Utagawa Hiroshige.
The Famous Places in the Various Provinces (Shokoku meisho) series was created by Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川広重).
We currently have 15 of 1 known prints from the Famous Places in the Various Provinces (Shokoku meisho) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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