Hatsune Riding Ground, from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei) 名所江戸百景)

Art Historical Context

Utagawa Hiroshige’s “Hatsune Riding Ground” belongs to his celebrated series *One Hundred Famous Views of Edo*, published between 1856 and 1858. Created during the final decades of the Edo period, the print captures a tranquil corner of the bustling capital—now modern Tokyo—where training grounds for horses once stood amid fields and waterways. Hiroshige, a master of the ukiyo-e school, used this ambitious project to document both celebrated landmarks and everyday scenes, offering viewers a vivid portrait of a city on the cusp of dramatic change. The work is a polychrome woodblock print, a medium that allowed artists to produce richly colored images through multiple carved blocks inked with precise registration. Published as part of an illustrated book by Uoya Eikichi, it exemplifies the technical sophistication of late-Edo printmaking, where delicate gradations of color and fine line work brought landscapes, human figures, cranes, and flowering plants to life on the page. Beyond its aesthetic appeal, the series enjoyed enormous popularity among Edo’s merchant class and later influenced Western artists such as Monet and Van Gogh. Today it remains a treasured record of Japan’s urban culture just before the arrival of industrialization, inviting modern viewers to wander the streets and bridges of a vanished city.

About the Artist

Utagawa Hiroshige|Uoya Eikichi · 1826–1869

Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), born Andō Tokutarō, was the last great master of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock printmaking and one of the most influential landscape artists in history. Born in Edo (modern Tokyo) into a low-ranking samurai family serving as fire wardens, Hiroshige transformed landscape printmaking into a poetic meditation on nature, weather, and everyday life. His revolutionary approac...