Plum Garden at Kameido, 1857
Utagawa Hiroshige
Ink on paper
A gnarled plum branch cuts boldly across a soft pink orchard beyond.
A vivid green sky glows behind the dark trunk of a blossoming plum tree, its branches slicing boldly across the foreground. Hiroshige's radical framing — nature pressed right up to the viewer — enchanted the Impressionists and still feels strikingly graphic.
What you're looking at
The sky is green. Not a dusk effect but a flat printed green, chosen because it works, and it is the first thing that unsettles the eye. The plum trunk is pressed right up against the picture plane and sliced by the edges, so a tree that is not the subject blocks most of the view of one that is. Van Gogh copied this one too.
On a Frame TV
About 2:3. Matted file — the clean crop would remove the foreground trunk, and the trunk is the idea. Bold flat colour, legible across a room and untroubled by bright light.
Brooklyn Museum · Visit it in New York →
- 4K master file (3840px+)
- Samsung Frame TV–ready crop
- Phone wallpaper crop
- Printable art card
Public domain · one .zip, no sign-up
More like this
Other works in the collection, starting with Utagawa Hiroshige.
