Plum Garden at Kameido (Kameido Umeyashiki), from the series "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei)"1857
The gnarled trunk of a plum tree, cut off by the edges of the print, fills the foreground, its branches dotted with white blossom, while visitors stroll among the trees beyond a low fence, against a sky shading from red to white. More about this work
About this work
The gnarled trunk of a plum tree, cut off by the edges of the print, fills the foreground, its branches dotted with white blossom, while visitors stroll among the trees beyond a low fence, against a sky shading from red to white. The tree is the Garyūbai, the Sleeping Dragon Plum, at the Umeyashiki garden in Kameido, one of Edo’s favourite spring sights. Hiroshige’s daring composition, with its huge close-up foreground and tiny distant figures, so impressed Vincent van Gogh that he copied it in oil in 1887. It comes from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.
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
- 1925.3752
- 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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