HIROSHIGE · The Echigoya Draper's Shop with Mt Fuji · 江户名胜 · 原作 1858 年 木版画 - 日本 - Edo Period (1600-1868)

Artist: Utagawa Hiroshige I (歌川広重, 1797–1858)
Title: Suruga-chō (寿留賀町)
Series: Edo meisho — Famous Places in Edo (江戸名所)

Publisher: Yamadaya Shōjirō, Kinkyōdō (山田屋庄次郎・金幸堂)
Date: Ansei 5 (1858), 3rd month — per date seal uma san (午三)
Signature: Hiroshige ga (広重画), in red cartouche lower left
Seals: Date/aratame seal and publisher's seal below the signature
Format: Horizontal ōban (yoko-e), nishiki-e
Technique: Woodblock print, ink and colour on hōsho paper
Size: 37 × 25 cm (sheet)
Provenance: Huguette Berès Collection, Paris
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Condition

Light centrefold. The colours and impression are very good; the whole Edo colour palette is still well preserved. The paper is sound with some minor soiling to the margins. Please study the images!
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About the Print

Suruga-chō was the one street address every Edo citizen could picture without being told. Running west from Nihonbashi, it was laid out so that Mount Fuji closed the view at its end — and on both corners stood the Echigoya, the dry-goods empire of the house of Mitsui. Hiroshige gives us the whole equation in a single sheet: the long blue noren curtains stamped with the Mitsui well-crib crest receding into depth on the right, the shop banners advertising silks and cottons above the crowd, and Fuji itself flushed pink with early light in the far distance at the left. Prosperity and permanence, framed as one view.

What makes the design work is the traffic. Two porters strain under a shoulder pole in the foreground, an errand-runner hurries past, two shopkeepers pause mid-conversation, and a small party of women in indigo and pale blue moves along the shopfronts — a street doing business rather than a monument being admired. The Echigoya sites are today occupied by Mitsukoshi and the Mitsui Bank, which gives the print an afterlife most meisho-e never acquire.

The sheet belongs to the Edo meisho series issued by Yamadaya Shōjirō, a long-running set of roughly forty horizontal ōban published across the 1850s. This design carries the uma san date seal placing it in the third month of Ansei 5 — the last year of Hiroshige's life, and the same period in which he was completing One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. He treated the Suruga-chō view more than once; this is the horizontal version, and the fuller, more populous of his readings.

The provenance adds real weight. Huguette Berès (1914–1999) was among the most discerning Paris dealers and collectors of Japanese prints of the twentieth century, and material from her collection has consistently drawn strong interest at auction.