Hiroshige Japanese Woodblock Print "Seido and Kanda River from Shoei Bridge"

Description

Hiroshige Japanese Woodblock Print "Seido and Kanda River from Shoei Bridge".  Number 47 from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1857.)
Beautiful condition print, never framed.
Publication:  Printed from re-carved wood blocks, by Brazillier, 1986.
Paper Size:  10.25" x 14.75"
Condition:  Excellent, with no flaws of note.
Impression:  Fine, with excellent registration and visible surface texture.
Color:  Fine, with deep saturated color, and bleed through to verso.
Description:  "The viewpoint is the Shoei Bridge, of which a slice appears in the lower right.  Beyond we look through the gorge of the Kanda River, with exquisitely shaded green banks rising high on either side.  These banks were not so dramatic in reality, but Hiroshige's picturesque exaggeration reminds us that this is not a natural river but rather a channel laboriously carved through Kanda Mountain in the 1600s as a way of diverting the flood-prone Hira River (which survives in part as the Nihonbashi River.)
The Seido of the title is the Sage's Hall, a shrine dedicated to Confucious and testimony to the Tokugawa shogunate's efforts to promote Confucianism as an orthodox creed of the state.  Here we see only the outer walls of the compound where the shrine and its affiliated Confucian college were located.  The shrine survives today as a traditionalist center of Chinese culture.  The site of the college, at the crest of the hill to the left, has been occupied by a variety of educational institutions in modern times; today it is the home of Tokyo Medical and Dental University.
This print is the first of three evocative depictions of rain in the series, all assigned to the 'Summer' group.  Each is a distinctively different kind of rain.  Here we see the steady slanting rain typical of the June
baiu
('plum rain' named for the fruit that appears then), a pleasant season of dull skies and rich greens that Hiroshige has captured perfectly.  In the river below, boatman...pole their cargo, while the people on the slope and the birds in the sky all seem at ease in the warm summer shower."  (Courtesy of original seller.)
Ships flat via USPS Priority Mail.