Hiroshige's Mount Daisen in the rain as a 40 × 50 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall

Utagawa Hiroshige – Hōki Province: Distant View of Mount Daisen from Ono, 1853 | Giclée Print

40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — Original size, 1:1
CHF 59.00
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Hiroshige's Mount Daisen in the rain as a 40 × 50 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • Hiroshige's Mount Daisen in the rain as a 40 × 50 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • Utagawa Hiroshige, Ono, Distant View of Mount Daisen in Hōki Province, 1853 — the woodblock sheet reproduced whole, rain over the rice fields with the mountain beyond
  • Hiroshige's Mount Daisen in the rain as a 50 × 70 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at actual print size: planters in straw capes and wide hats in the flooded paddies, the cut rain lines running across them
  • Hiroshige's Mount Daisen in the rain as a 40 × 50 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • Utagawa Hiroshige, Ono, Distant View of Mount Daisen in Hōki Province, 1853 — the woodblock sheet reproduced whole, rain over the rice fields with the mountain beyond
  • Hiroshige's Mount Daisen in the rain as a 50 × 70 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at actual print size: planters in straw capes and wide hats in the flooded paddies, the cut rain lines running across them
Utagawa Hiroshige – Hōki Province: Distant View of Mount Daisen from Ono, 1853 | Giclée Print

Utagawa Hiroshige – Hōki Province: Distant View of Mount Daisen from Ono, 1853 | Giclée Print

CHF 59.00
Size

Rain over the rice fields at Ono. Hiroshige rules the whole sheet with fine diagonal lines — the woodblock shorthand for rain, each stroke cut into the block by hand — and behind them Mount Daisen stands flat and grey-blue, more a presence than a mountain.

In the paddies below, people go on working under wide hats, bent over the flooded terraces, while a line of dark pines holds the middle distance. It is the least dramatic subject in the series and one of the best: weather, distance and labour, held in three bands of colour.

Which impression. Woodblocks wear and pigments fade, so no two surviving sheets look alike. This one is the Art Institute of Chicago's, from the Frederick W. Gookin Collection: the rain lines are still crisp and unbroken, and the greens of 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: 33 × 22.2 cm / 13.0 × 8.7 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, 1.8× original

Why the border is wider here. We do not enlarge a line-cut work beyond 1.8×: past that, the lines the cutter made stop reading as cut lines. On the 50 × 70 sheet our usual 8 % border would have meant 1.89×, so the border is opened to 10 % and the print stops at 1.8×. A slightly smaller image on the same sheet, on purpose.

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), Ono, Distant View of Mount Daisen in Hōki Province (Hōki, Ono, Daisen enbō), from the series Famous Places in the Sixty-odd Provinces (Rokujūyoshū meisho zue), 1853; colour woodblock print, ōban, 33 × 22.2 cm.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Frederick W. Gookin Collection, Acc. No. 1939.1504.
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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