Yūhigaoka at Meguro in the Eastern Capital Possibly 1858

Utagawa Hiroshige’s “Yūhigaoka at Meguro in the Eastern Capital” is a woodblock print, a distinctly process-intensive medium. To make it, the artist would first create a drawing, then specialized wood carvers would translate that design into a series of blocks, one for each color. These were then handed off to printers, who carefully applied pigments and pressed the paper to create the final image. The beauty of this landscape, with its gently sloping hillside, wouldn't be possible without this division of labor. The print’s flat planes of color, and the crisp outlines defining the trees and distant Mount Fuji, are all effects of the woodblock process. It’s also worth remembering that prints like this were commercial products, relatively inexpensive and widely distributed. Hiroshige’s poetic image was thus made accessible to a broad public audience. Thinking about how these prints were produced, consumed, and circulated opens our eyes to the social life of art, reminding us that aesthetics and economics are always intertwined.