“Jūmantsubo Plain at Fukagawa Susaki”
“Jūmantsubo Plain at Fukagawa Susaki” is a gorgeous ink and polychrome woodblock print on paper made by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist, Utagawa Hiroshige, from 1856. This is print number 107 of Hiroshige’s 118 woodblock print art series titled One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.
Hiroshige is most remembered for his various landscape series with his poetic lines and muted colors. This is a fine example of his work. In this painting, Hiroshige depicts a wintry scene of a marshland with a hawk overhead looking for prey. The viewer is looking northwest from Fukagawa Susaki along Edo Bay toward Jūmantsubo.
The One Hundred Famous Views of Edo art series is made up of 118 woodblock prints. It is regarded by many as one of the finest and most ambitious series made during this era of art. During the nineteenth century towards the end of the shogunate era, the arts flourished. In Japan, the shogun government system lasted for a very long time, from 1192 to 1867.
Hiroshige lived in Edo his entire life. Most of the art he created depicted that area of Japan. In 1603, Edo became the capital of Japan. By the nineteenth century, during Hiroshige’s lifetime, over 1 million people lived there. The adoption of the woodblock technique made art accessible to a much wider audience. This new access to art resulted in a cultural explosion of art that happened at that time. Hiroshige was very popular, but he was never paid very well for his work and remained relatively poor for most of his life.
“Jūmantsubo Plain at Fukagawa Susaki” is currently in many collections that you can see, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, California, in the United States.
For more on Utagawa Hiroshige, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
