Eisen & Hiroshige — The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō
The inland road from Edo to Kyoto through the mountains, begun by Keisai Eisen and completed by Utagawa Hiroshige: sixty-nine prints of post towns in snow, rain, moonlight and mountain weather.
69 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
The series
The Kisokaidō, or Nakasendō, was the other great road between Edo and Kyoto: longer and harder than the coastal Tōkaidō, climbing through the Kiso mountains, with sixty-nine post towns. The series was begun around 1835 by Keisai Eisen for the publisher Takenouchi Magohachi of the Hōeidō, who had just issued Hiroshige's Tōkaidō; Eisen designed the first stations, then Hiroshige took the project over for the publisher Iseya Rihei of the Kinjudō and finished it around 1842. Eisen's twenty-four and Hiroshige's forty-seven sit side by side here, each signed on the sheet.
The prints here
Sixty-nine of the seventy-one designs, each reproduced whole from a single early impression: forty-nine from the National Diet Library in Tokyo, the only near-complete open set, and the rest from the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Rijksmuseum and the Library of Congress. Two designs, the rare first Nakatsugawa and Ōtsu, have no open high-resolution copy and are left out for now. The Library sheets had been mounted in an album, and the faint centre fold on each has been evened out; the paper's own tone and texture are kept.
Hanging the set
Every view is a landscape ōban sheet of roughly 10 by 15 inches, printing up to 36×24. The famous nocturnes and weather scenes make a strong row of three: Wada's snowy pass, Mochizuki's pines in the moonlight and Nagakubo's full moon over the bridge, or Seba's evening moon with Kutsukake's rain and Itahana's snow.