Plum Garden at Kameido (Kameido Umeyashiki), from the series "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei)"

This print shows the plum garden at Kameido, one of the famous viewing spots in Edo (now Tokyo). It comes from Hiroshige's series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, published in 1857. Van Gogh copied it in oil paint in 1887. A single plum tree dominates the foreground, its trunk cutting across the composition in a dramatic diagonal. The tree was known as the "Sleeping Dragon Plum," the most famous tree in Edo, and Hiroshige framed it so that its branches fill the upper portion of the image. Behind it, smaller plum trees in bloom stretch into the distance, their blossoms rendered as small white dots against a reddish sky. Figures stroll among the trees, tiny in scale. The sky is an unusual warm red, a color choice that gives the print its distinctive mood. Hiroshige was near the end of his life when he designed the One Hundred Views series. He had been the leading landscape printmaker in Edo since the 1830s. The series was published by Uoya Eikichi and was printed with expensive techniques including bokashi, the gradual color shading visible in the red sky. The One Hundred Views was one of the last major ukiyo-e landscape series. Hiroshige died in 1858, the year after this print was published. The series influenced Van Gogh and the Impressionists, who collected Japanese prints in Paris in the 1860s and 1870s. Van Gogh made painted copies of this print and of Hiroshige's Sudden Shower on the Ohashi Bridge. Color woodblock print, oban format, 36 by 24.4 centimeters. The red sky was achieved with bokashi, a hand-applied gradient on the block. The plum blossoms are small stamped marks printed from a separate block. The warm reds and whites of this print make it suitable for rooms with soft lighting and warm tones. It works well in a living room or bedroom with cream walls and natural wood furniture. The 16x20 framed version in a red oak frame complements the print's warm palette. This print is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, part of the Clarence Buckingham Collection. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), from the Art Institute of Chicago. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 24x36 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.