A Mirror Stand - The Autumn Moon

Utagawa Hiroshige, Views of Ōmi #3: Autumn Moon At Ishiyama Temple, 1834 Twenty years ago I wrote here about the tradition of 'Eight Views' in Chinese and Japanese art, stemming from the original Eight Views of the Hsiao and Hsiang Rivers. The adoption of this theme in Japan was helped by the fact that only two of the eight actually mention places in China. As Haruo Shirane writes in Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons (2012), this flexibility led 'artist, poet and audience to graft their own favourite domestic and local places onto them' - Edo, Kanazawa and most famously The Eight Views of Ōmi (Ōmi hakkei), which I listed in my earlier blog post. Here I'll be focusing on one of these, the Autumn Moon at Ishiyama, for which Hiroshige designed a lovely print in 1834, where the southern end of Lake Biwa shimmers behind the hillside. Views of Ōmi became so well known that by the eighteenth century it was possible to parody them. Suzuki Harunobu's 1766 Zashiki Hakkei, Eight Parlour…