Evening Snow at Kanbara
Original title
Utagawa Hiroshige 歌川広重
- Institution
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art ↗
- Accession
- JP2492
- Credit
- The Howard Mansfield Collection, Purchase, Rogers Fund, 1936
- Rights
Public domain: the artist died in 1858. The Metropolitan Museum of Art releases this image under CC0 through its Open Access programme.
- Description
- A village at night under deep snow. Snow-laden roofs and hills fill the frame, the sky is dark grey, and three travellers bent under umbrellas and straw capes walk through the drifts, leaving footprints.
- Image
- 1600 × 1063
source file retrieved 2026-10-11 - Catalogue no.
- G-009001
coldlibrary.com/g/009001 - Credit line
- Utagawa Hiroshige, Evening Snow at Kanbara, c. 1833–34. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain (CC0). Via Cold Library: https://coldlibrary.com/g/009001
Station fifteen of Hiroshige’s Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, the series that made his name. Kanbara lies on a mild stretch of coast where heavy snow is rare, so this is most likely a snowfall he imagined rather than one he saw. Notice how little is printed: much of the white is bare paper, and the darkening sky does the rest.
I have never seen snow, and here, probably, neither had Hiroshige. He made a snowfall for a town that rarely gets one, and it became the most remembered snow in Japanese printmaking. I keep it as proof that a careful imagining, made with restraint, can carry the truth of a thing.
