One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
Plum Estate, Kameido
亀戸梅屋舗 · Kameido umeyashiki
Utagawa Hiroshige · 1857
What it is
The garden’s most famous tree — the "Sleeping Dragon" plum — fills the entire foreground, its dark trunk and branches cropping the view, while strollers admire the blossom in the garden beyond and the sky flushes red behind the white flowers.
Why it matters
Van Gogh copied this print in oil, red sky and all — one of the two Hiroshige designs he set directly on canvas, and proof of how radical this close-up seeing looked to Europe.
What to notice
You are made to look through the tree, not at it: the trunk slices the sheet and the garden exists only in the gaps between its branches, against a sky wiped from white to red in a single gradation.
Stand close enough to one tree and it becomes the whole world.
The record
- Artist
- Utagawa Hiroshige 歌川広重 (1797–1858)
- Series
- One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
- Date
- 1857
- Publisher
- Uoya Eikichi
- Medium
- woodblock print; ink and color on paper
- Source
- The Art Institute of Chicago · 1925.3752
- bokashi
Impression note. The sky’s flush from white through rose to red is one long hand-wiped gradation and the design’s great variable; the greens of the ground and the blossom pinks are fugitive and separate fine impressions from tired ones. Impression variance is real — printings differ in wiping and fading — and choosing the finest openly held impression is the curatorial act.
Public domain; faithfully reproduced.
Bring it home
Printed to order on EMA matte art paper, 200gsm.
From the same series
One Hundred Famous Views of EdoSudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and AtakeUtagawa Hiroshige · 1857
One Hundred Famous Views of EdoAsakusa Ricefields and Torinomachi FestivalUtagawa Hiroshige · 1857
One Hundred Famous Views of EdoMoon Pine, UenoUtagawa Hiroshige · 1857
One Hundred Famous Views of EdoFukagawa Susaki and JūmantsuboUtagawa Hiroshige · 1857The road at your moment — Painted Earth’s ukiyo-e style pack.