The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Utagawa Hiroshige · Meisho Edo hyakkei, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo · a series of polychrome woodblock prints, nishiki-e, ink and colour on paper · vertical ōban · published in Edo by Uoya Eikichi, 1856 to 1859, issued sheet by sheet under censor’s seals and date seals · still appearing when Hiroshige died in the autumn of 1858, a small number of the last sheets generally given in whole or in part to his pupil Hiroshige II · the unit scored: the series as designed and issued, with its contents page, in good early impressions, as one work; later impressions and reproductions are survival and reach, not the work
Mode
The famous-place print turned upright: a near motif cut by the frame, a far view small beyond it, almost no middle ground
Mythos
The poetic store of named places and seasons; Fuji at the horizon as the city’s fixed point; the foxes of Ōji gathering on the year’s last night
Phase
Issued sheet by sheet in Edo, 1856 to 1859; the late work of a master at the head of the trade, still appearing at his death in 1858
Presentation
Colour woodblock prints in the vertical ōban format, keyblock and colour blocks with graded colour throughout; the series judged in good early impressions, with its contents page
Register
From the hush of snow and the cold height of the eagle to the bustle of bridges and festival; pleasant more often than elevated, and never terror
Scale
A cat on a sill to the sky over a snowy plain; one city, one year, many sheets
Governing Proposition
Sheet after sheet, the famous places of a city are shown on paper turned upright, and in the best of them something near and enormous fills the frame and is cut by its edges, a plum trunk, a horse’s flank, a carp streamer, an eagle’s spread wings, while the named place lies small and far beyond it, with almost nothing between. The sheets are ordered by season, so that the run makes the city a year, from spring plum to winter snow and the fox fires of the year’s last night. The wager of the series is that a place is known from where a body stands in it, at a season and an hour, and that a commercial print series, cut on wood and sold sheet by sheet, can hold a whole city that way.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Meisho Edo hyakkei, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, is a series of polychrome woodblock prints, nishiki-e, in the vertical ōban format, designed by Utagawa Hiroshige and published in Edo by Uoya Eikichi from 1856 to 1859. It was issued sheet by sheet, each sheet carrying a censor’s seal and a date seal, and it was a success that the publisher extended: one hundred was a round number of the genre, and the series ran past it. The sheets are ordered by season, spring, summer, autumn and winter, so that the run makes the city a year.
Hiroshige was born in 1797. He died in the autumn of 1858, while the series was still appearing, and a small number of the last sheets are generally given in whole or in part to his pupil Hiroshige II; which sheets exactly is not settled. The work scored is the series as designed and issued, with its contents page, as one work, and those last sheets belong to it: they are credited or charged to the series, not to the named maker. It is judged in good early impressions. Later impressions with altered colour, and the fading of the colour in surviving sheets, bear on its survival only.
The titles of the sheets are given here in their common English forms, which vary. The sheets weighed most are these: Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake; Plum Park in Kameido; Suidō Bridge and Surugadai; Fukagawa Susaki and Jūmantsubo; Asakusa Ricefields and Torinomachi Festival; Kinryūzan Temple at Asakusa; Fireworks at Ryōgoku; Inside Kameido Tenjin Shrine; Naitō Shinjuku in Yotsuya; and Fox Fires on New Year’s Eve at the Changing Tree, Ōji. They are the series’ best third, and on them its standing chiefly rests.
Movement II
The inheritance was the picture of famous places: the illustrated guides, which showed a named view from a raised and neutral point, and the horizontal landscape print as Hokusai had made it and as Hiroshige himself had made it in his Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō of the early 1830s, with the view set back and composed across the sheet. Western perspective, known in Japan through Dutch prints, was already part of that inheritance.
The series turned landscape upright, in a format then used mainly for figure prints, and in its best sheets set an extreme near against an extreme far. At Kameido the trunk of the Sleeping Dragon plum crosses the whole foreground, cut by the frame, and the trees beyond are seen through it. At Naitō Shinjuku a horse’s hindquarters fill the near ground. At Suidō Bridge a carp streamer fills the sheet over the town, with Fuji beyond. Between the near thing and the far place there is almost no middle ground. Western perspective is absorbed and pressed past itself: the recession is there, but the eye is put where a body would stand, behind the post or under the branch.
The stake was a commercial one, and real. This was the late series of an old master at the head of the trade, and it put his name and his publisher’s money on a format and a manner unlike the ones that had made him. It succeeded. Not every sheet takes the step: a run of quieter views, many of them summer and autumn river prospects and shrine precincts, are the older horizontal composition set on end, without the near and far. Those sheets are where the series’ law loosens, and the parts it could most easily lose.
Movement III
The bridge is seen from above, with figures running over it. The rain crosses the whole sheet in fine black lines, at two angles, cut in the block without a slip, and the sky darkens from the top in graded colour. It is weather made into line, and it is the clearest proof that in this medium the making is the picture: the carver’s knife and the printer’s wiping of colour on the block do what the drawing alone could not.
Graded colour runs through the series. Skies pass from deep blue or red to bare paper in a few centimetres and carry the hour, dawn or dusk or night. Snow is paper left bare against grey and dark: at Kinryūzan, where the great red lantern of the temple gate hangs in snow, and at Susaki, where an eagle stoops over a white and empty plain, its spread feathers filling the top of the sheet, the scale of the sky made by one creature. The keyblock line is spare, so that colour carries the depth, and the near motif is designed to the edge of the sheet in full control of its weight against the small distance.
These are the series’ heights, and they come in more than one register: transport out of weather at the bridge, a cold height at Susaki, a hush at Kinryūzan, one burst of fireworks against a deep blue night at Ryōgoku, pale fox fires in dark fields at Ōji. Many other sheets are pleasant rather than elevated, routine in drawing and in figure, and the printing, which decides each impression, is uneven across the edition. The best sheets stand level with the best of their medium; the run does not.
Movement IV
In Asakusa Ricefields and Torinomachi Festival a cat sits on a sill in a room of the Yoshiwara, and beyond it, across the fields, the festival procession is seen small and distant. Set it beside the eagle over Susaki, a cosmic height with no human figure, and the series’ law shows. Both are a famous place of Edo, at a season, seen from a body’s standpoint, a near motif set against a far one. Under that law the range is wide: interior and sky, festival and empty field, snow and fireworks, day and night.
What the series discloses can be stated, and it holds: a city is known by the one who walks it, from inside, at the height of a body, through a window, past a horse’s flank, under a streamer, between the posts of a bridge. The famous place of the guidebooks becomes a place lived in, at a season and an hour, by porters, boatmen, pilgrims, the women of the quarter and a cat, and ordinary life and festival share one frame. It is a disclosure of place and of seeing more than of a human condition, since the figures are small and are types. The series has also been read as a record of the city rebuilt after an earthquake; that reading is interpretation, and the face of most sheets does not show it.
Behind the views is a store of association older than the prints: places named in poetry, and plum, cherry, maple and snow, each with centuries of verse behind it. The series calls on it constantly and builds on it once at scale, in the year. At its winter end, on New Year’s Eve, the foxes gather at the Changing Tree at Ōji before going to the Inari shrine, their fires pale among dark fields: a legend shown as fact in the dark, on the year’s last night. Fuji stands at the edges of many sheets as the city’s fixed sacred point. Most of the series’ myth is atmosphere carried by allusion; the year is the part it builds.
Movement V
In 1887 van Gogh copied two sheets of the series in oil, Plum Park in Kameido and Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi, and the cropping and flat colour of Japanese prints, these among the most collected, run through his work in Paris and Arles. Whistler’s Nocturnes, above all Old Battersea Bridge, are widely traced to Hiroshige’s bridge views. Monet collected Hiroshige, and the Japanese bridge at Giverny is in that line. The cut foreground passed through Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Nabis into the poster, photography and graphic design, though there the line widens to the Japanese print at large, and much of the reach is shared with Hokusai.
The series has been looked at for about 170 years, in Japan and since the 1860s in Europe and America, and it survives whole in form: the designs are complete in many impressions and in complete sets. Its fabric is paper and fugitive colour. The reds and blues of many surviving impressions have faded, and later impressions were pulled with altered colour from worn blocks, so the work as made stands in good early impressions only. It has been read as topography, as a manual of near and far, as a document of Western perspective received in Japan, as a key to Japonisme, and, late, as a seasonal structure to be read in order; the best sheets reward return, and many middle sheets give what they have at once.
Beside Hokusai’s The Great Wave (8.9), which wins eleven axes and loses only The Encompassed, the series stands at 8.4, in Tier IV, level with Hokusai’s Fine Wind, Clear Morning (8.4) by another route: it wins The Unconcealment, The Bottomless Well, Pressure on Tradition and The Encompassed, ties The Swerve and The Made, and loses the other six, where a single sheet is tighter than a run. Monet’s Water Lilies (8.6), in its line of reach, wins eight axes, stands level on The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep, and loses The Imperishable and The Encompassed. Ogata Kōrin’s Irises (8.3) stands a tenth below; Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (8.0) and Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book (8.1), each ordered in part by season, stand below. On the sheet at Kameido the trunk still crosses the whole foreground, and the plum park still lies beyond it, small.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the series, sheet by sheet, and here the subtractive test bites. A run of commercial sheets issued over three years as a publisher’s success was extended is a structure that permitted its scale rather than compelled it: one hundred was a round number of the genre, and the series ran past it. Take away a dozen of the quieter summer and autumn views, river prospects and shrine precincts drawn in the older horizontal manner set on end, and the work loses little; take away the shower, the eagle, the cat, the carp or the fox fires and it loses its character. The season frame is required, and within the best sheets necessity is high. Strong within the sheet, loose across the run.
Score: 7.6 / 10
What is disclosed can be stated: a city is known by the one who walks it, from inside, at the height of a body, through a window, past a horse’s flank, under a streamer, between the posts of a bridge. The famous place, which the guidebooks had shown as a named view from a raised and neutral point, becomes a place lived in, at a season and an hour, by porters, boatmen, pilgrims, the women of the quarter and a cat; ordinary life and festival share one frame. The series has also been read as a record of the city rebuilt after an earthquake, which is interpretation. Held below 8.0 because the disclosure is of place and of seeing, and the figures are too small and generic to articulate a human condition.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Elevation recurs, and in more than one register. In Sudden Shower the rain falls in fine black lines, the sky darkens from the top, the figures run on the bridge: transport out of weather. Over Susaki an eagle’s spread feathers fill the top of the sheet and the plain lies white and empty below, the scale of the sky made by one creature. At Kinryūzan the red lantern hangs under snow, a hush. At Ryōgoku one burst of fireworks stands against a deep blue night. At Ōji pale flames move among dark fields, an eerie height. Against these rise many sheets that are pleasant rather than elevated, and a print at arm’s length cannot give the transport of a vault or a wall.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The meisho tradition is itself a store of association: places named in poetry, and plum, cherry, maple and snow, each with centuries of verse behind it. The series evokes that store on almost every sheet. Built myth is rarer. The year is built, since the season order makes the run a calendar of the city, and at its winter end the foxes gather at the tree at Ōji on New Year’s Eve before going to the Inari shrine, a legend shown as fact in the dark. The eagle over the plain reads as more than a bird, and Fuji recurs at the edges as the city’s fixed sacred point. But the archetypal is mostly a seasonal and poetic atmosphere carried by allusion, rarely lifted to the archetype by structure.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The inheritance: the illustrated guides to famous places, and the horizontal landscape print as Hokusai and Hiroshige himself had made it, his Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō of the early 1830s among them, the view set back and composed across. The departure: landscape turned upright, in a format then used mainly for figure prints, and the extreme near and far, a huge foreground motif cut by the frame set against a deep, small distance with almost no middle ground. Western perspective, known through Dutch prints, is absorbed and pressed past itself. The stake: an old master at the head of the trade staked his name and his publisher’s money on a format and a manner unlike his proven one. The cost was risked commercially, and the series succeeded.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The vertical sheet is the first instrument: it lets the near motif run the height of the frame while the distance sits small beyond it, so that the viewer stands where a body would stand, behind the post or under the branch. Turn it horizontal and the view returns to the prospect it left. The woodblock is the second: graded colour gives the skies of dawn and dusk that carry the hour, and flat fields and a keyed line make the cropping read as design, not accident. The series is the third, since a city cannot be a year in one sheet. Held below the top because that third instrument is only partly load-bearing: sheets are bought, seen and remembered singly.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over promise. The series has been looked at, collected, copied and studied for about 170 years, in Japan and since the 1860s in Europe and America, and it keeps yielding: as the topography of a lost city; as a manual of cropping and of near and far; as a record of the city after the earthquake, in one reading; as a document of the Japanese reception of Western perspective; as a key to Japonisme; and as a seasonal and poetic structure to be read in sequence, a reading that came late. Formal depth is high in the best sheets, which reward return. Held short of the summit because much of the yield is historical and contextual rather than inexhaustible within the image, and many middle sheets give what they have at first sight.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Weighed within its own field, the Japanese landscape print; force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the series is the last great reorganisation of the form before the Meiji era ended the tradition’s first life, and its upright composition of near and far became a language. The discount: much of the reach is shared with Hokusai and with the Japanese print at large, and is charged so. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in 1887 van Gogh copied Plum Park in Kameido and Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi in oil, and the cropping and flat colour of the prints run through his Paris and Arles work; Whistler’s Nocturnes, above all Old Battersea Bridge, are widely traced to Hiroshige’s bridge views; Monet collected Hiroshige, and the Japanese bridge at Giverny is in that line; the cut foreground passed through Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Nabis into the poster, photography and graphic design.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Survival weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: whole. The designs survive complete in many impressions and in complete sets, and nothing that made the work is lost. Presence: continuous since issue, first in the Edo market, then in Europe from the 1860s, then in museum collections and in reproduction; fame is presence and earns at most a tenth. Fabric is the smallest charge, but here it is real. Prints are paper and fugitive colour: the reds and blues of many surviving impressions have faded, and later impressions were pulled with altered colour from worn blocks, so the work as made stands in good early impressions only. About 170 years, with the widest presence; the fading and the degraded later states hold the figure at 9.0.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Command of the colour woodblock, judged as made by designer, carver and printer together. The making is load-bearing. The rain of Sudden Shower is cut as fine parallel lines across the whole sheet, at two angles, without a slip. The graded skies pass from deep blue or red to bare paper in a few centimetres and carry the hour. The snow at Kinryūzan and Susaki is paper left bare against grey and dark. The keyblock line is spare, so that colour carries the depth, and the near motif is designed to the edge of the sheet in full control of its weight against the small distance. Charged: the run is uneven, some middle sheets routine in drawing and figure, the last plates by or with another hand, and the printing uneven across the edition.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant sheets: the eagle over the white plain of Susaki, a cosmic height with no human figure, and the cat on the sill at Asakusa, a domestic interior in the pleasure quarter. They obey one law: a famous place of Edo, at a season, seen from a body’s standpoint, a near motif set against a far one. The range under that law is wide, from interior to sky, festival to empty field, snow to fireworks, day to night. The law is broken where the run falls back into the older horizontal composition set upright, without near and far, and where the late plates by another hand differ in touch; those sheets obey the genre’s looser law, not the series’ own. One physics for most of the run, with lapses.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The orders held: the natural order, in season, weather, river, bay, birds, plum, cherry, iris, maple and snow; the city as a built and peopled place, its bridges, wharves, timber yards and shops; labour, in boatmen, porters, raftsmen and farmers; the sacred, in shrines, temples, Inari and its foxes, and Fuji; festival and pleasure, in the fireworks, Torinomachi and the Yoshiwara; and time, the year and the hour. The season order and the standpoint integrate them. What holds the axis is what the form cannot hold: no consciousness beyond the viewer’s, no family, no state, no history beyond the city’s rebuilding, which is implied rather than shown, and figures that are types. A print series cannot encompass what a novel does, and the figure says so.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, with Pressure on Tradition and The Made at 8.9. Designs that survive whole in many impressions and complete sets after about 170 years, their one charge the fading of fugitive colour and the worn later states; an upright composition of near and far that became a language, carried by name into van Gogh’s copies and through Whistler and Monet into modern design; and a making in which the rain is cut as line and the hour is printed as graded colour.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and The Encompassed at 7.6: a run that the publisher’s success extended past its round number, which could lose a dozen quieter sheets without loss; and a city held in its seasons, labour, sacred places and festivals, with no consciousness beyond the viewer’s, no family and no state, the figures types. Above them, The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 and The Unconcealment at 7.9: the myth is mostly atmosphere carried by allusion, and the disclosure is of place and of seeing rather than of a human condition. The four are one fact: the series is a city seen, sheet by sheet, from where a body stands.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.9, The Living Form at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 7.9 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 fall short, the first by six tenths and the second by seven. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. The twelve sum to 100.4, an average of 8.37 that displays 8.4, in Tier IV; the summit is withheld at the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, six tenths short of 9.0, would withhold it besides.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the series as it survives in its impressions and complete sets, of how such prints were made and of its history and reception, not from a survey of every sheet; no impression, image or written source was consulted, and the reading’s knowledge is fullest for the famous sheets and thinner for the middle run of summer and autumn views, where judgments are held with a margin. The work scored is Meisho Edo hyakkei, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, by Utagawa Hiroshige, the series of polychrome woodblock prints in the vertical ōban format published in Edo by Uoya Eikichi from 1856 to 1859, as designed and issued, with its contents page, as one work. The early impressions are its witnesses; a faded or later impression is a worse witness, not a different work. Command of the medium is judged on design, cutting and printing together; the carvers and printers are not named. The last sheets, issued after Hiroshige’s death in the autumn of 1858, a small number of them generally given in whole or in part to his pupil Hiroshige II, belong to the one work and are credited or charged to the series; which sheets those are is not settled. The fading of colour and the later impressions from worn blocks are weighed only as facts of survival. Not in the unit: Hiroshige’s other series, the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō among them, which are context; van Gogh’s copies of 1887 and the later prints, paintings and designs that answer the series, which are reach. Sheet titles are given in their common English forms, which vary; only the series title is given in Japanese, romanised. No words are quoted. A reading of the series as a record of the city rebuilt after an earthquake is stated as interpretation. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the exact number of sheets and their count by season, the designer of the contents page, the dimensions of the sheet, the use of embossing or mica on particular sheets, the names of the carvers, which sheets are by Hiroshige II, the date of the earthquake and the timing of the series against it, the source of Whistler’s particular bridge, the near figure in the sheet at Haneda, and which collections hold complete early sets and their published facsimiles.