The 40 × 50 cm giclée print of Hiroshige's Maples at Mama, unframed, shown flat with its white border

Utagawa Hiroshige – Maples at Mama, ca. 1857 | Giclée Print

40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — Original size, 1:1
CHF 59.00
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The 40 × 50 cm giclée print of Hiroshige's Maples at Mama, unframed, shown flat with its white border
  • The 40 × 50 cm giclée print of Hiroshige's Maples at Mama, unframed, shown flat with its white border
  • Utagawa Hiroshige, Maples at Mama, ca. 1857 — the woodblock sheet reproduced whole, red maple leaves across the top and the Tekona shrine far below
  • Hiroshige's Maples at Mama as a 50 × 70 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at actual print size: the maple branch, the hand-wiped gradation of the sky and the paper grain of the 1857 impression
  • The 40 × 50 cm giclée print of Hiroshige's Maples at Mama, unframed, shown flat with its white border
  • Utagawa Hiroshige, Maples at Mama, ca. 1857 — the woodblock sheet reproduced whole, red maple leaves across the top and the Tekona shrine far below
  • Hiroshige's Maples at Mama as a 50 × 70 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at actual print size: the maple branch, the hand-wiped gradation of the sky and the paper grain of the 1857 impression
Utagawa Hiroshige – Maples at Mama, ca. 1857 | Giclée Print

Utagawa Hiroshige – Maples at Mama, ca. 1857 | Giclée Print

CHF 59.00
Size

Red maple leaves hang across the whole top of the sheet, so close that the branch is cut off by the frame. Underneath, far below and very small, a teahouse, a pine, the roofs of the Tekona shrine and a strip of water. The eye is put where a person standing under the tree would have it — a piece of framing so modern it looks like a photograph taken by accident.

Hiroshige made it around 1857 for One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, his last great series. Mama, in what is now Chiba, was a half-day trip from the city and famous for its autumn colour. The deep red is a printed gradation, wiped onto the block by hand before each pull, so no two impressions are quite alike.

What this is. A giclée reproduction of the Metropolitan Museum's impression, 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 × 23 cm / 14.1 × 9.1 in — Metropolitan Museum of Art
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 hand-wiped gradation in the leaves breaks into its own streaks and the woodgrain 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), Maples at Mama (Mama no momiji), from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei), ca. 1857; woodblock print, ink and colour on paper, 35.9 × 23 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1918, Acc. No. JP646.
Public domain. The Museum publishes its digitisation under Open Access (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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