print
- Museum number
- 1915,0823,0.738
- Title
-
Object: Yui, Satta-mine Oya-shirazu 由井薩多嶺親志らず (Yui: Satta Peak, [The Coast of] Oya-shirazu)
-
Series: Gojusan-tsugi meisho zue 五十三次名所圖會 (The Fifty-Three Stations: Illustrations of Famous Places, No. 17)
- Description
-
Colour woodblock oban print. Travellers ascending long slope along costal cliff; ships in bay; Mt Fuji in distance. Inscribed, signed, sealed and marked.
- Production date
- 1855 (Seventh month)
- Dimensions
-
Height: 35.80 centimetres
-
Width: 24.30 centimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
-
-
-
-
-
- Curator's comments
- Clark 2001
Oya-shirazu (literally, 'forgetting a parent') is the name used to describe a treacherous coastline beaten by waves where there is not even time for 'a child to look back for a parent, or a parent to look back for a child'. Until the construction of the Satta Pass by the Shogunate in 1655, the route of the Tokaido had been along the rocky shoreline at low tide, here seen partially covered by the sea. At other times the waves could certainly be more dramatic (cat. 86). A comparison with cat. 76, the view of the same location from the 'Hoeido' Tokaido series of more than twenty years before is instructive. The elements of the scene are now more smoothly integrated but this results in an undeniable lack of focus or drama. Instead of three tiny travellers perched at a vertiginous vantage-point at the top of the cliff in the earlier version, this composition is much more explanatory, taking us up the long slope that leads to the high pass. The figures are of the stereotypical 'stick-leg' kind (it almost looks as if they are on stilts) of Hiroshige's later years. Compensatory interest is created by the use of unusual, even unnatural colours - the yellow and black sky here, the pink and purple sky in the previous (cat. 78). The line of the right slope of Mt Fuji has been deliberately fragmented to suggest that it is glimpsed through the trees.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
Exhibited:
2001, 11 May-29 Jul, BM Japanese Galleries, '100 Views of Mount Fuji'
- Acquisition date
- 1915
- Acquisition notes
- Transferred from Department of Oriental Manuscripts (August 1915)
- Department
- Asia
- Registration number
- 1915,0823,0.738
