歌川广重 · 1891 年纪念版 · 亀戸天神社内 · 日本木版画 - 日本 - 明治時期（1868-1912）

** Edo-period first impressions from this series now sell well into four figures in comparable condition. This is the 1891 Memorial Edition — the only later edition of these designs available on the market, and clearly dated and documented as such in the margin. It offers the most attractive way to collect these designs: the same Edo-period woodblock craftsmanship, genuinely high quality, with Meiji-era colouring. It is a Meiji antique in its own right, now more than 130 years old and the only Design in the Series bearing hiroshige's own mark **

Artist: Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川広重, 1797–1858), signed Hiroshige ga (広重画)
Title: 亀戸天神境内 Kameido Tenjin keidai — Inside Kameido Tenjin Shrine
Series: 撰出江戸四十八景 Senshutsu Edo Shijūhakkei — Forty-eight Selected Views of Edo; original design No. 65 (summer section) of 名所江戸百景 One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, first published 1856

This Edition: 1891 Memorial Edition (Meiji recut)
Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga), polychrome (nishiki-e)
Format: Ōban tate-e, approx. 36 × 24 cm (14.2 × 9.4 inches)
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Paper & condition

Very good impression with very fine colours!. A few minor soiling and toning spots in the margins. Otherwise sound. Please study the images!
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About the print

Kameido Tenjin, in the low-lying east of Edo, is the shrine of Sugawara no Michizane — god of scholarship, and a man exiled to Kyushu who is said to have been followed there by his beloved plum tree. Its grounds hold a steep vermilion drum bridge modelled on the one at Dazaifu Tenmangū, and, from the eighteenth century onwards, the finest wisteria trellises in the city. In the fourth and fifth months the whole of Edo came out to see them.

Hiroshige builds the design around the one thing a visitor actually experiences and no map can show: the flowers are above you. Racemes of pale violet hang down from the top edge of the sheet, some of them falling almost its full height, so that the entire view has to be read through them. Behind that hanging screen the drum bridge rises in a single unbroken pale arch, its curve answering the fall of the blossom — two figures crossing at its top, small enough to give the span its true scale. Below, the low red bridge carries a line of visitors past a row of hanging paper lanterns, the pond lies flat and pale green, and pines and rockwork crowd in from the right. Two swallows cut across the water; a third crosses the empty sky.