Motoyama

A huge pine, about to fall, crosses the top of the picture from left to right. The trunk is supported by two logs, and beneath it men gather around a bonfire, one sitting with a pipe in his mouth. From the road at left come a traveler in a broad hat and a child, and on the slope at right a person carrying brushwood climbs up.

The sky is a deep indigo gradation, and white smoke rising from the bonfire splits the picture vertically. The ocher ground, the red-brown of the pine trunk, and the green of the slope are painted in clear contrast, and the curve of the great trunk encloses the whole picture like a frame. The figures are tucked small beneath it.

Motoyama was a post town between Niekawa and Seba, located near the northern entrance to the Kiso Road. The area is also said to be the birthplace of soba-kiri (cut buckwheat noodles), and a book of the mid-Edo period records that Motoyama's soba-kiri spread throughout the provinces.

This is a design by Utagawa Hiroshige. The way the fallen pine is propped up and kept in use is thought to depict a piece of mountain-dwellers' wisdom. The composition of dividing the picture with a large tree is related to the Karuizawa print and others, and it was a device Hiroshige used repeatedly in this series.