1848
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Seki, from the series The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō is a 1848 by Utagawa Hiroshige, a Romanticism work, depicting Snow, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a snowy village at night: bare trees, dark roofs, and a single lantern glowing in the distance. Hiroshige swapped an earlier busy scene for this quiet one. The road is empty now, as if the travelers have vanished into the cold. The print belongs to a series that turned a real highway into fifty-three moments like this. To see how he painted light in the dark, look up *chiaroscuro*.
This print from one of Hiroshige’s later Tōkaidō series completely reconceives the scene at Seki. An earlier series showed an entourage of a daimyō, preparing to leave an inn, but this view plunges the station into the depths of a dark winter. Daimyō were regional military rulers during Japan’s Edo period. As the central government required them to live in the capital, Edo, in alternating years, daimyō processions along the Tōkaidō thoroughfare were a frequent sight. This print, however, emphasizes the pilgrimage route to Japan’s principal site of religious worship, the Ise Shrine, indicated…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川 広重) or Andō Hiroshige (安藤 広重), born Andō Tokutarō (安藤 徳太郎; 1797 – 12 October 1858), was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist, considered the last great master of that tradition.
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