Komagata Hall and Azuma Bridge (Komagata-dō Azuma-bashi),

ca. 1857

Hiroshige lived all his life in Edo (present-day Tokyo) and depicted the city and its parks, markets, temples, and shrines in most of his fukei-ga (landscape) and meisho-e (famous places) prints. This work, from his 118-print series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, shows a temple and bridge on the Sumida River, which flows through the city. Shops and restaurants flank the temple; the red flag on the pole indicates a perfume shop. Like the other works in the ambitious series, this print demonstrates the artist's innovative compositional approaches. He crops out much of the temple (at lower left) and places the banner pole and airborne bird in the near foreground so as to suggest movement into depth. Both Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh owned prints from this series and were among numerous European artists who were fascinated by Hiroshige's techniques.