Hiroshige's Asakusa Ricefields as a 40 × 50 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall

Utagawa Hiroshige – Asakusa Ricefields and Torinomachi Festival, 1857 | Giclée Print

40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — Original size, 1:1
CHF 59.00
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Hiroshige's Asakusa Ricefields as a 40 × 50 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • Hiroshige's Asakusa Ricefields as a 40 × 50 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • Utagawa Hiroshige, Asakusa Ricefields and Torinomachi Festival, 1857 — the woodblock sheet reproduced whole, a white cat on the windowsill looking out over the rice fields towards Mount Fuji
  • Hiroshige's Asakusa Ricefields as a 50 × 70 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at actual print size: the white cat on the sill, the lattice of the window and the paper grain of the 1857 impression
  • Hiroshige's Asakusa Ricefields as a 40 × 50 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • Utagawa Hiroshige, Asakusa Ricefields and Torinomachi Festival, 1857 — the woodblock sheet reproduced whole, a white cat on the windowsill looking out over the rice fields towards Mount Fuji
  • Hiroshige's Asakusa Ricefields as a 50 × 70 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at actual print size: the white cat on the sill, the lattice of the window and the paper grain of the 1857 impression
Utagawa Hiroshige – Asakusa Ricefields and Torinomachi Festival, 1857 | Giclée Print

Utagawa Hiroshige – Asakusa Ricefields and Torinomachi Festival, 1857 | Giclée Print

CHF 59.00
Size

A white cat sits on a windowsill with its back to us, looking out. Beyond the lattice: rice fields, a line of low roofs, geese in the sky and Mount Fuji, small and pale. On the sill behind the cat lie a hairpin and a folded paper — the room is a brothel in the Yoshiwara, and the guest has left at dawn.

Hiroshige tells the whole story by leaving the people out. It is the most quietly modern picture in the series: a framed view, a foreground object cut off by the edge, an animal standing in for everyone who is not shown.

Which impression. Woodblocks wear and pigments fade, so no two surviving sheets look alike. This one is the Art Institute of Chicago's, the gift of Chester W. Wright, and it is an early, unfaded pull: the indigo band along the top is deep, the pink dawn light above the horizon is intact, and the greens in the fields have not gone yellow.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks. It is not a woodblock print and is not sold as one — a woodblock print is pulled by hand from cut cherry blocks, and the good impressions are in museums.

Scale
Original: 35.9 × 24.8 cm / 14.1 × 9.8 in — Art Institute of Chicago
40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — Original size, 1:1
50 × 70 cm / 19.7 × 27.6 in — Enlarged, 1.7× original

At original size the sheet is exactly the ōban format a buyer in Edo held. Enlarged, the cat is the size of a real cat and the woodgrain of the block comes up through the sky — a different picture, and a deliberate one.

The sheet is reproduced whole, including the title cartouche and the publisher's seals. Nothing is cropped away but the museum's mount.

Provenance
Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), Asakusa Ricefields and Torinomachi Festival (Asakusa tanbo Torinomachi mōde), from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei), 1857; colour woodblock print, ōban, 35.9 × 24.8 cm.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Chester W. Wright, Acc. No. 1961.147.
Public domain. The museum publishes its digitisation under CC0.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre. The paper tone of the original is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.

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