Mitsuke, from the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō
Name
Katsushika, Hokusai, 1760-1849 (Artist)
Nishimuraya, Yohachi (Publisher)
Iseya, Rihei (Publisher)
Title
Mitsuke, from the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō
Other Titles
Mitsuke 見附, from the series Tōkaidō gojūsan tsugi 東海道五十三次
Abstract
About halfway between Edo (current-day Tokyo) and Kyoto, Mitsuke was the twenty-eighth station of the Tōkaidō. In this image, Hokusai chose to focus, in the foreground, on a spear-bearing assistant and a pack-horse, relegating the Mitsuke landscape to the background.
This series of images illustrating the fifty-three stations of the Tōkaidō is characteristic of Hokusai's style in the early 1800s, when, unlike several decades later, the artist focused on figures instead of landscape and used the traditional narrati ve device of cloud patterns.