Famous Places on the Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, Five Stations (Tokaido gojusan eki goshuku meisho)

Utagawa Kuniyoshi's Tokaido gojusan eki goshuku meisho is the most fully developed of his compact Tokaido projects of the late 1830s and 1840s, in which the great highway between Edo and Kyoto was distributed across sheets that grouped five neighboring post stations together. The five-station format allowed Kuniyoshi to compress the Tokaido into roughly ten or eleven sheets rather than the canonical fifty-three plus terminal cities, giving each print enough room to develop a richer composition while still preserving the rhythm of the highway. As an example of late Edo fukei-e, the project belongs to a saturated market in which the basic Tokaido formula had been thoroughly absorbed by buyers and in which novelty came through unusual groupings, fresh vantage points, or inventive framing devices that distinguished one designer's vision of the highway from another's. Kuniyoshi treats each station with characteristic economy, identifying it through its famous bridge, noted teahouse, distinctive natural landmark, or seasonal observance, and arranging the five vignettes within a unifying landscape or cartouche pattern that gives the sheet its visual coherence. The publisher and exact date should be verified against the standard reference catalogues, but the prints fit comfortably within the network of mid-Edo houses that supplied Kuniyoshi landscape alongside his more famous warrior subjects. Modern scholarship places the project within the broader comparative literature on Edo Tokaido series, where it is read alongside the Hoeido, the Reisho, and the various Kunisada and Kuniyoshi cycles as evidence of how thoroughly the highway had become embedded in popular visual culture. The prints continue to circulate in collections of Kuniyoshi landscape and stand as some of the most accomplished examples of the warrior-print master's quieter topographic register.

The Famous Places on the Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, Five Stations (Tokaido gojusan eki goshuku meisho) series contains 4 prints, created by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

The Famous Places on the Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, Five Stations (Tokaido gojusan eki goshuku meisho) series was created by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川国芳).

We currently have 4 of 4 known prints from the Famous Places on the Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, Five Stations (Tokaido gojusan eki goshuku meisho) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.