At the Mouth of the Aji River c. 19th century

Utagawa Sadahiro made this woodblock print, ‘At the Mouth of the Aji River,’ in nineteenth-century Japan. It shows laborers working on a large ship, with a figure and two children looking on. Sadahiro worked in Osaka, a major center of commerce in Japan at the time. The ships in the image speak to the city’s importance as a port. Woodblock prints were an important part of the commercial culture of Japanese cities: they were relatively cheap and easily available, so they provide insight into the everyday life of the period. This print would have been made for sale to the general public. The figures in the image are not idealized heroes but ordinary workers and local residents. We can learn more about the culture of nineteenth-century Osaka by looking at surviving copies of this print in museum collections and libraries and comparing them with other artworks and documents from the period. What can the historian learn from images like these? We can begin to understand how the institutions of art participate in the creation and circulation of meaning.