English
Edo - Images of a city between visual poetry and idealized reality
By Melanie Trede. Excerpt from the book 'Hiroshige. One Hundred Famous Views of Edo'
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The third compositional principle to contribute to the fame of this series is that of a motif seen close up and usually cropped by the margin of the print; through the motif, or to one side, the actual scene is situated in the middle distance and background. The stimulus for this technique, which was certainly unusual and occasionally comes across as contrived, originates also in Western vanishing-point perspective. But Hiroshige emphasizes the contrast between the large object in the foreground, known as a repoussoir, and a background pushed further into the distance than would have been conceivable in mid-19th-century European art. The extreme cropping of the motifs was also unusual amongst Hiroshige's Japanese predecessors; this is true, for example, of the "pictures in the Dutch style" (ranga) painted since the end of the 18th century. The apparent randomness of the cropping suggests that a certain moment in the course of an action is being captured. In the Plum Orchard in Kamada, for example, the empty palanquin encourages us to imagine the coming and going of the visitors. Suggestive details such as these were intended to provide contemporary buyers of the prints with something to discuss. The well-known Hiroshige scholar Suzuki Ju - zo- described this technique as photographic, while the most influential connoisseur of the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo in the West, Henry D. Smith, referred to them as proto-filmic, since they included the element of time.
The City of Edo and its People
When the founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, Ieyasu (1542-1616), occupied Edo in 1590, the city was still a country town surrounded by marshy land. After becoming shogun in 1603, he had the local castle comprehensively rebuilt, and soon the city began to develop into a political center, and increasingly a place of commercial importance. Its cultural achievements began to unfold only after the catastrophic Meireki fire of 1657, which claimed more than 100,000 lives and razed both the city and the castle to the ground in a matter of hours. Reconstruction, however, proceeded rapidly and in a well-organized fashion. Edo at this time covered 44 square kilometers (17 square miles), making it more than twice the size of Japan's second-biggest city, Kyoto. By 1725, it had become half as big again, while its population, at more than a million, was the largest of any city in the world. By the mid-19th century, when the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo appeared, it had an area of almost 80 square kilometers (30 square miles) and an estimated population of up to two million.
More than half of these people were craftsmen and merchants, but they inhabited only 21 per cent of the total area. These two estates were regarded as the lowest ranking in the Confucian four-estate system (shino-ko- sho- ) introduced by the Tokugawa dynasty, the top rank of the social hierarchy comprising the warrior caste and the second the farmers. The system did not extend to either the imperial court aristocracy or to the hinin and eta, who were classified as "non-human".
Page [1] [2] [3] [4]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4]
The third compositional principle to contribute to the fame of this series is that of a motif seen close up and usually cropped by the margin of the print; through the motif, or to one side, the actual scene is situated in the middle distance and background. The stimulus for this technique, which was certainly unusual and occasionally comes across as contrived, originates also in Western vanishing-point perspective. But Hiroshige emphasizes the contrast between the large object in the foreground, known as a repoussoir, and a background pushed further into the distance than would have been conceivable in mid-19th-century European art. The extreme cropping of the motifs was also unusual amongst Hiroshige's Japanese predecessors; this is true, for example, of the "pictures in the Dutch style" (ranga) painted since the end of the 18th century. The apparent randomness of the cropping suggests that a certain moment in the course of an action is being captured. In the Plum Orchard in Kamada, for example, the empty palanquin encourages us to imagine the coming and going of the visitors. Suggestive details such as these were intended to provide contemporary buyers of the prints with something to discuss. The well-known Hiroshige scholar Suzuki Ju - zo- described this technique as photographic, while the most influential connoisseur of the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo in the West, Henry D. Smith, referred to them as proto-filmic, since they included the element of time.
The City of Edo and its People
When the founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, Ieyasu (1542-1616), occupied Edo in 1590, the city was still a country town surrounded by marshy land. After becoming shogun in 1603, he had the local castle comprehensively rebuilt, and soon the city began to develop into a political center, and increasingly a place of commercial importance. Its cultural achievements began to unfold only after the catastrophic Meireki fire of 1657, which claimed more than 100,000 lives and razed both the city and the castle to the ground in a matter of hours. Reconstruction, however, proceeded rapidly and in a well-organized fashion. Edo at this time covered 44 square kilometers (17 square miles), making it more than twice the size of Japan's second-biggest city, Kyoto. By 1725, it had become half as big again, while its population, at more than a million, was the largest of any city in the world. By the mid-19th century, when the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo appeared, it had an area of almost 80 square kilometers (30 square miles) and an estimated population of up to two million.
More than half of these people were craftsmen and merchants, but they inhabited only 21 per cent of the total area. These two estates were regarded as the lowest ranking in the Confucian four-estate system (shino-ko- sho- ) introduced by the Tokugawa dynasty, the top rank of the social hierarchy comprising the warrior caste and the second the farmers. The system did not extend to either the imperial court aristocracy or to the hinin and eta, who were classified as "non-human".
Page [1] [2] [3] [4]
Hiroshige. One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
Japanese binding + bookcase 13.4 x 16.7 in., 294 pages
$ 150.00
$ 150.00
Hiroshige's Edo: Masterful ukiyo-e woodblock prints of Tokyo in the mid-19th century
Aoi Slope outside Toranomon Gate, 11-1857