The Five Pines on the Onagi River

The upper half of the picture is taken up by one great pine whose branches stretch from the left bank out over the water. The limbs are held up by several props, and beneath them a boatman poles a boat carrying passengers. The river bends broadly to the right as it recedes, and embankments and rows of houses line both banks far into the distance.

The deep indigo of the water and a faint band of rose at the bottom of the sky suggest an autumn evening. The real Onagi River is a straight canal, but Hiroshige is said to have bent its course sharply to create depth, so that the pine's branches and the arc of the river answer each other within the composition.

The Onagi River is said to have been dug at the order of Tokugawa Ieyasu to carry salt from Gyotoku to Edo, and boats carrying pilgrims to Naritasan also passed along it. The Five Pines was a famous tree whose branches reached out over the water from a daimyo's secondary residence, and it is said to have kept the name even after only one pine remained in the last years of the shogunate.

This print is placed near the end of the autumn section. Its censor's seal gives July 1856 (Ansei 3), about half a year after publication of the series began. Setting a large tree in the foreground against a distant view is one of the compositions common in this series.