Utagawa Hiroshige – Winter: Snow on the Sumida River, c. 1833–38 | Giclée Print

A man poles a bamboo raft down the Sumida while the snow comes down. The reeds along the near bank stand capped in white, the far bank is a low white line, and a snow-laden bough hangs across the upper half of the sheet. In the top left corner stands a poem, cut into the block with the picture.

The sheet is an ōtanzaku — a tall, narrow format, 38 cm high and 13 wide, made to hang in a narrow space. It is the winter sheet of Hiroshige’s series «Famous Places of Edo in the Four Seasons», published in the 1830s.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks from the Rijksmuseum’s own open-access photograph of the woodblock print. It is not a woodblock print and is not sold as one.

Scale
Original: 38.3 × 12.6 cm — colour woodcut on paper, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

• 40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — original size, 1:1. Image 12.75 × 38.30 cm.
• 40 × 60 cm / 15.7 × 23.6 in — enlarged, 1.40× original. Image 17.84 × 53.60 cm.

A narrow picture on a standard sheet
A tanzaku fits no standard frame. We print it centred on a normal sheet, which leaves the side margins wide — the same thing a mat would do, and it lets you frame in an off-the-shelf 16 × 20 or 16 × 24 inch frame.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, centred on the sheet. The colour of the museum’s file is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.

Provenance
Utagawa Hiroshige (Japanese, 1797–1858), Fuyu Sumidagawa no yuki (Winter: Snow on the Sumida River), from the series «Shiki Edo meisho», 1833–38. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-1956-771; purchased in 1956 with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt.

Where this comes from
The museum file, the measurements, and what we are allowed to sell: the record for this sheet.

Further reading
Why This Print Is Not Bigger