The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō (1833–34)

The road and the journey

The Tōkaidō, or Eastern Sea Road, was the most important highway of Edo-period Japan. It ran along the Pacific coast of Honshū from Edo, the shogun's city, to Kyoto, the imperial capital, and along it stood fifty-three post stations with stables, food and lodging for travelers.

According to reference sources, Utagawa Hiroshige traveled the road in 1832 with an official delegation taking horses from the shogun to the imperial court, sketching along the way. Back in Edo he began the series: one print for each station, plus one for the departure from Nihonbashi bridge in Edo and one for the arrival in Kyoto, 55 in all. Scholars debate whether he saw every view himself, since some designs borrow from an illustrated guidebook of 1797, Tōkaidō meisho zue.

How the prints were made and sold

The series is usually called the Hōeidō edition, after the publisher Takenouchi Magohachi, whose shop was Hōeidō; his name appears on many sheets as Takenouchi. The first prints were issued jointly with another publisher, Senkakudō, and the rest by Hōeidō alone. Hiroshige later designed many other Tōkaidō sets, but this is the one people mean when they speak of his Fifty-Three Stations.

Each sheet was printed from a key block of outlines and separate blocks for each color. The Cleveland Museum of Art notes that three different blocks were needed to print the three shades of grey that suggest distance in the bamboo thicket in Driving Rain at Shōno. Prints like these sold cheaply; reference sources put the price at roughly 12 to 16 copper coins, about the cost of a pair of straw sandals or a bowl of soup.

Evening Snow at Kambara and Driving Rain at Shōno

Evening Snow at Kambara, the sixteenth print in the series (Kambara is the fifteenth station), shows a village buried in snow at night, with three travelers trudging along the road. The Cleveland Museum of Art points out that the coastal town rarely sees snow, and that this may be the first print in which Hiroshige depicted falling snow. The snowflakes are spots carved out of the block, so they print as bare white paper against the grey sky.

Driving Rain at Shōno shows the opposite kind of weather. Travelers and palanquin bearers run up a slope as wind and rain bend a bamboo grove into grey silhouettes. Cleveland notes that the publisher's name, Takenouchi, and part of the series title are written on one of the umbrellas, a small advertisement worked into the picture. Both prints are favorites because Hiroshige turns weather and time of day into the real subject of the scene.

Why the series became famous

The Hōeidō Tōkaidō is described in reference sources as Hiroshige's best-known work and among the best-selling of all Japanese prints. Coming just after Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, it helped establish the landscape print as a major subject and made Hiroshige the leading landscape artist of his time.

Its reputation spread abroad in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Vincent van Gogh's collection of Japanese prints included sheets from the series, and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, a keen collector, organized a Hiroshige exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1906. In Japan the series was famous enough to be parodied: in 1850 Utagawa Kuniyoshi published Cats Suggested as the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, replacing each landscape with a cat pun.

The impressions in this archive

The main image is Cleveland 1985.317, Evening Snow at Kambara, from the Kelvin Smith Collection. It measures 22.6 x 35.5 cm and is recorded with the signature Hiroshige ga, the publisher's seal Takenouchi and the censorship seal kiwame. Its record traces it through a Sotheby Parke Bernet sale in 1975. Driving Rain at Shōno (1948.306) and Yokkaichi: View of the Mie River (1948.307), which Cleveland identifies as coming from Hiroshige's first Tōkaidō series, were given from the collection of Dr. T. Wingate Todd in 1948.

The archive also holds Yahagi Bridge at Okazaki (1916.939), the Tenryū River near Mitsuke (1940.985), the Lake at Hakone (1940.982), Ōtsu (1985.238) and Chiryū (1985.239), all recorded with the Hōeidō or Takenouchi publisher. A second Kambara (1940.984) is catalogued by Cleveland as after Hiroshige, meaning the museum does not treat it as an impression of the original edition; its paper is darkened and the colors faded. Other Tōkaidō prints in the archive, such as Hiroshige's later sets from the 1840s and a Shinagawa by Hiroshige II, belong to different series and are not part of this page.