In the mid-19^th century in the city of Edo, now called Tokyo, a Japanese artist called Hiroshige was one of the country’s foremost painters and print designers. He had already become famous for depicting the Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido Gojusantsugi), a series of landscape prints that tell us as much about the cultural landscape of 19^th-century Japan as its geography. In the late 1850s, Hiroshige chose to depict views of his beloved city Edo in a series called One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Edo Meisho Hyakkei).

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