Awa Province: Naruto Whirlpools (Awa, Naruto no fūha), from the series Famous Places in the Sixty-Odd Provinces (Rokujūyoshmeisho zue)1855
The whirlpools of the Naruto Strait, between the island of Awaji and Awa Province on Shikoku, churn in swirling spirals of blue and white, while waves crash against rocky islets. More about this work
About this work
The whirlpools of the Naruto Strait, between the island of Awaji and Awa Province on Shikoku, churn in swirling spirals of blue and white, while waves crash against rocky islets. The tidal currents there are among the strongest in Japan. Hiroshige designed the print in 1855 for Famous Places in the Sixty-odd Provinces, using the tall vertical format to stack the view from foreground rocks to distant shore and turning the turbulent water into a dynamic, almost abstract pattern.
Written by Ochre Editions.
What you’re looking at
A work made of color woodblock print; ōban.
Description from the Art Institute of Chicago.
How it was made
- Colour woodblock print
- In Japan these were a team effort. The artist drew the design, a carver cut it into cherry-wood blocks, one block for each colour, and a printer brushed on the pigment and rubbed each sheet by hand. Full-colour prints of this kind were called nishiki-e, “brocade pictures”, from the 1760s on.
- Ōban
- The standard large Japanese print size, about 38 × 25 cm.
Utagawa Hiroshige
Japanese, 1797–1858
Hiroshige was born into a family of Edo fire wardens and trained under Utagawa Toyohiro. His breakthrough came in the early 1830s with The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, scenes along the highway between Edo and Kyoto. He went on to design thousands of landscapes attentive to weather, season and the hour of day, ending with One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, still unfinished at his death. Van Gogh made a painted copy of one of its views, Plum Garden at Kameido.
Written by Ochre Editions.
Ukiyo-e
Japanese woodblock prints of the floating world: actors, courtesans, landscapes and the sea.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Art Institute of Chicago has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 1939.1501
- Credit
- Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Type
- Department
- Arts of Asia
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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More by Utagawa Hiroshige
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