** City scene with people in the street carrying umbrellas. There are median gardens with shrubs and cherry trees in blossom and buildings lining the street. This is an established design from the series. ** Artist: Utagawa Hiroshige II 二代歌川広重 (1826–1869) Title: Shin Yoshiwara 新よし原 — The New Yoshiwara (No. 18, 十八) Series: Edo meisho shijūhakkei 江戸名所四十八景 — Forty-eight Famous Views of Edo Publisher: Tsutaya Kichizō 蔦屋吉蔵 (Tsutakichi seal, right margin) Date: 1860–1861 (Man'en 1 / Bunkyū 1) Format: Chūban tate-e, 25 × 17 cm Technique: Woodblock print (nishiki-e), ink and colour on paper Signature: Hiroshige ga 廣重画, in a blue tanzaku cartouche at lower right __________________________________________________________________ CONDITION Strong impression and colors are well perserved with minor toning and some soiling, minor trimming on the margins. The paper is firm and subtle. Please check the images! __________________________________________________________________ ABOUT THE PRINT The Yoshiwara was Edo’s only licensed pleasure quarter. It first stood near Nihonbashi. After the Great Meireki Fire of 1657 it was moved to the rice fields behind Sensō-ji in Asakusa, and from then on it was called Shin Yoshiwara, the “New Yoshiwara”. Visitors entered through a single gate, the Ōmon, which opened onto the main avenue, Nakanochō. In spring, Nakanochō became one of the city’s most unusual cherry-blossom sights. From the 1740s onward, the district’s business leaders had budding cherry trees brought in and planted in rows down the centre of the avenue. The trees were taken out again once the blossoms had fallen, at the end of the third lunar month. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston notes that even people with no interest in what the quarter sold came to the Yoshiwara just to see the cherries. Planting fully grown trees for a few weeks and then removing them shows how advanced Edo-period horticulture was. The first Hiroshige had shown the same seasonal custom in No. 38 of One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1857). Hiroshige II took it up again for this chūban set. Impressions of this sheet are held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which gives the inscription as 江戸名所四十八景 十八 新よし原 and lists it in the Kubo Tsunehiko and Sons Collection Ukiyo-e Hanga catalogue (2004), #16-18. Further impressions are in the MAK in Vienna and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. __________________________________________________________________ ABOUT THE SERIES Edo Meisho Shijūhakkei is a complete set of forty-eight chūban sheets, each pairing one of Edo's famous places with the seasonal feature it was known for; the publisher's seal and the censor's seal alternate from sheet to sheet, and two printing dates are documented — the twelfth month of Man'en 1 (1860) and the first month of Bunkyū 1 (1861). The publisher was Kōeidō, Tsutaya Kichizō. Hiroshige II — born Suzuki Chinpei, pupil and adopted son-in-law of the first Hiroshige — inherited the name in 1858 and, with it, the obligation to keep the studio's famous-places line running. This set belongs to the very last years of Edo: within seven years of its publication the city had a new name and a new government, and the pleasure districts it records were about to change beyond recognition. The chūban format made them affordable souvenirs at the time, which is precisely why they now read as an unusually candid record of where townspeople actually went.