Distant View of Mount Akiba at Kakegawa (Station #27)

Catalog note / 解説

Station twenty-seven on the Tökaidö, Kakegawa is located in what is currently Shizuoka Prefecture. Here Hiroshige has created a playful scene in which a kite flies beyond the borders of the picture, infusing the image with a sense of energetic movement. Framing devices such as the black outline around each of Hiroshige’s Tökaidö prints published by Hoeidö were originally adopted from the Western practice of framing a composition, and were an innovation introduced to Japanese art largely through woodblock prints. In this case, it also indicates that the prints were intended to be released as a bound album once the series was complete, and customers that bought the prints one by one as they w…