Pair of Hiroshige Woodlblock Prints from "Thirty-Six Views of Mt.

Utagawa Hiroshige (Japanese, 1797-1858). "In the Mountains of Izu Province" and "Ichikokubashi Bridge in Edo" two woodblock prints from "Fugaku sanjurokkei" (1891 Memorial Edition). A pair of color woodblock prints from Hiroshige's late masterwork "Fugaku sanjurokkei" (Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji), issued in the 1891 memorial edition. "In the Mountains of Izu Province" sets a milky cascade tumbling between forested ridges of grey and jade, the snow-capped cone rising pale beyond. Its companion, "Ichikokubashi Bridge in Edo", carries travelers in blue and ochre across a timber span while a rose-flushed horizon frames a distant Fuji, weeping willows spilling over the right margin. Both retain the vertical cartouche at upper right, the artist's red seal, and the delicate bokashi gradations that made the series a summation of Hiroshige's landscape idiom. Printed in oban tate-e format on thin washi, matted and framed under glass. Utagawa Hiroshige designed "Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji" in 1852, publishing it through Tsutaya Kichizo in the year of his death, 1858. Conceived in vertical oban format, it answered Katsushika Hokusai's celebrated horizontal series of the same name and became Hiroshige's valedictory statement on the mountain that had shadowed his entire career. Where Hokusai treated Fuji as a geometric protagonist, Hiroshige folded it into weather, distance, and human traffic: a pale silhouette glimpsed past willows, ferrymen, and gorges. The blocks were reissued in 1891 as a memorial edition. Meiji reissues of this kind were pulled from recut or surviving blocks with aniline-tinged pigments then newly available, and they are collected on their own terms as documents of the late-nineteenth-century revival of interest in ukiyo-e, a revival driven in no small part by Western japonisme. Item # 204531

Estimate:$350

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