One Hundred Famous Views in Edo is Hiroshige’s final masterpiece. The series includes 119 landscape prints and were categorized by four seasonal divisions. They represent an unparalleled level of craftsmanship in the genre. In one of the three most famous sheets in the whole series, New Year’s Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Ôji, the artist departed from his usual studies of the observed world and ventured into fantasy. Based upon the belief that foxes are messengers of the deity of agriculture (Inari Ōkami), this print depicts the local custom used by farmers to read the signs of harvest from foxfires. This imagined landscape employs many skillful printing techniques. In the layers of darkness the print discloses subtle differences in the green tips of the branches, the mound of the Inari Shrine at the distant right, the haystacks scattered in the field, and more than sixty foxes approaching the large tree. The foxes are rendered with pale bright color and precise yet elegant lines, creating a strong visual contrast with the landscape and producing a daunting yet solemn atmosphere.

Other Impressions found at: British Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Selected Readings:

• Hiroshige, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Introductory essays by Henry D. Smith II and Amy G. Poster; commentaries on the plates by Henry D. Smith II; preface by Robert Buck. George Braziller, Inc., New York, The Brooklyn Museum, 1986.
• Miyao, Shigeo. Meisho Edo Hyakkei. from series “Ukiyoe meisaku senshū ;11-12.”[Tōkyō]: Yamada Shoin, [1967].
• Nagai Kafu, Kyoko Selden, Alisa Freedman. Ukiyo-e Landscapes and Edo Scenic Places (1914) from “Review of Japanese Culture and Society,” Volume 24, 2012, pp. 210-232 (Article). University of Hawai’i Press.
• Goree, Robert Dale, Jr. Fantasies of the Real: Meisho zue in Early Modern Japan. Yale University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2010. 3414979.
• Foster, Michael Dylan. Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yōkai. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2009.

Posted by Huichao Han
April 19, 2016