“Plum Estate, Kameido”
“Plum Estate, Kameido” is a polychrome ink and color woodblock print on paper by the Japanese artist, Utagawa Hiroshige. He painted this in 1857 just a year before his premature death from cholera.
Hiroshige was an artist of the ukiyo-e school who lived from 1797 to 1858 during the Edo Period of Japan. He is most remembered for his various landscape series with his poetic lines and muted colors.
This painting depicts one of the most famous trees in Edo known by locals as “Ryugabai” which means the “Sleeping Dragon Plum” or “Resting Dragon Plum”. It was known for its long limbs resting on the ground and the vibrancy of its white blossoms. The tree was located in the Umeyashiki plum garden park along the Sumida River in modern day Tokyo. Unfortunately, all of the trees in the park were killed in 1910 from a severe flooding episode in the city.
The plum tree dominates the foreground. Figures can be seen in the background admiring the plum trees. The sky is red fading into blue. A wooden block in the upper left adds depth and perspective and helps to direct viewers’ eyes to the figures in the background.
This piece is plate number 30 of Hiroshige’s most well-known art series titled One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. It is made up of 118 woodblock prints that were commissioned to highlight the beautiful parts of the city of Edo as it was being rebuilt after the destructive earthquake of 1855. The series is regarded by many as one of the finest and most ambitious series made during the nineteenth century peak of Japanese art that occurred towards the end of the shogunate era.
Vincent Van Gogh was an admirer of Japanese woodblock prints. In 1887, he painted a copy of two pieces from Hiroshige’s series as a study of Japanese art and for his own private collection. He painted his version of “Plum Estate, Kameido” using oil paints on canvas and titled it “Flowering Plum Tree (after Hiroshige)”. He also did a copy of “Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi bridge and Atake”, titling it “Bridge in the rain (after Hiroshige)”.
Several original woodblock prints of “Plum Estate, Kameido” can be seen on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, the Brooklyn Museum in New York City, New York, the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in and the British Museum in London, England, among other institutions.
For more on Utagawa Hiroshige, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
