Same image as 46.1.50, 46.1.55, 46.1.88, and 54.1.23, though there are some minor changes.

On verso in pencil, lower right: Jo XV 10-2. On mat in pencil: JO XV 10-2, Hiroshige, Odawara Station 10, Sakawa River, 46.1.87. Censor's seal: Kiwame.

Nishiki-e, horizontal oban; colored ink on paper.

Odawara, a town connecting to Hakone Pass, is seen from the Sakawa River. The settlement had developed as the castle town of a lord of the Muromachi period (1392-1573), Hojo Soun (1432-1519), and kept on prospering as the castle town of Lord Okubo, who had ruled the district since 1590. The Nikawa River cuts diagonally through the foreground. Beyond the far bank, characteristically reinforced with long bamboo tubes filled with gravel, and across the marshy lands that extend to the foothills, appear the castle and the town's houses. The Hakone Mountains are rendered in a stacatto manner, with patches of light and dark colors. Travelers are being carried across the shallow water of the Nikawa River in a palanquin on a platform carried by many bearers, or individually, on the shoulders of numerous men.

In addition to the low horizon, another feature indicates that Hiroshige, like Hokusai, studied Western-style landscape: the systematic treatment of the light that hits the sides of the mountain. The triangular shapes that indicate the fall of the light from its source tend leftward. In traditional Japanese "shading" of mountains and rocks, the light and dark appeared in arbitrary and decorative patterns that did not account for the illusionistic device of a single light source; in other words, the light might have come from all points.

Ref. "Hokusai and Hiroshige," p.172.

Hoeido (Takenouchi Magohachi) seal.

This object has the following keywords:

• Hiroshige's Tokaido (c. 1833-1834)
• Tokaido Road, Japan

This object is a member of the following portfolios: