Hiroshige's Plum Garden at Kameido as a 40 × 50 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall

Utagawa Hiroshige – Plum Garden at Kameido, 1857 | Giclée Print

40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — Original size, 1:1
CHF 59.00
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Hiroshige's Plum Garden at Kameido as a 40 × 50 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • Hiroshige's Plum Garden at Kameido as a 40 × 50 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • Utagawa Hiroshige, Plum Garden at Kameido, 1857 — the woodblock sheet reproduced whole, a plum trunk across the foreground, white blossom against a red and white sky
  • Hiroshige's Plum Garden at Kameido as a 50 × 70 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at actual print size: the plum blossoms against the printed sky gradation and the paper grain of the 1857 impression
  • Hiroshige's Plum Garden at Kameido as a 40 × 50 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • Utagawa Hiroshige, Plum Garden at Kameido, 1857 — the woodblock sheet reproduced whole, a plum trunk across the foreground, white blossom against a red and white sky
  • Hiroshige's Plum Garden at Kameido as a 50 × 70 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at actual print size: the plum blossoms against the printed sky gradation and the paper grain of the 1857 impression
Utagawa Hiroshige – Plum Garden at Kameido, 1857 | Giclée Print

Utagawa Hiroshige – Plum Garden at Kameido, 1857 | Giclée Print

CHF 59.00
Size

A plum trunk stands hard against the picture plane, so close that it is out of focus in the mind's eye, and the garden — visitors, fences, a hundred more trees in flower — is pushed far behind it. The sky is a flat band of red shading to white. Nothing recedes the way European pictures recede.

Vincent van Gogh copied this sheet in oil in 1887 and framed his copy with invented Japanese characters. He was not quoting a masterpiece; it was a cheap print he had bought by the bundle. What he was after is exactly what stops you here: a foreground that refuses to get out of the way.

Which impression. Woodblocks wear and pigments fade, so no two surviving sheets look alike — this one is the Art Institute of Chicago's, from Mr. and Mrs. Harold G. Henderson. The red-to-white gradation in the sky is printed cleanly and still saturated, and the green of the ground is still green; on most surviving sheets it has turned to olive.

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: 34.9 × 23.9 cm / 13.7 × 9.4 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

At original size the sheet is exactly the ōban format a buyer in Edo held. Enlarged, the blossoms separate from the trunk and the hand-wiped gradation in the sky breaks into its own streaks — 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), Plum Garden at Kameido (Kameido Umeyashiki), from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei), 1857; colour woodblock print, ōban, 34.9 × 23.9 cm.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harold G. Henderson, Acc. No. 1965.1027.
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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