The archive / Ukiyo-e / Plum Garden at Kameido
Plum Garden at Kameido
Utagawa Hiroshige · 1797–1858
3 variations + a matched story print, every standard frame ratio. sRGB · up to 300 DPI · personal-use license.
Print it your way — at home, a local shop, or a gallery print delivered to your door. See the printing guide →
Sizes in the download
Print-ready files at every standard frame ratio below — the full image, nothing cropped:
The print is crisp at 300 DPI up to about A3, and stays sharp at 150 DPI from across the room, out to about 24×36″.
[ Will it fit your frame? ]
The work
A famous tree, seen from inside its branches.
A single plum trunk fills the foreground, so close the frame slices it off; behind it, small figures wander among blossoms. The sky above them is a flat sheet of red, printed as a smooth gradient with no horizon to anchor it. Hiroshige made this print, from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, in 1857. The space reads less like depth than design — startlingly modern.
Look closer
The Sleeping Dragon Plum.
That trunk was a real tree, the Garyōbai or Sleeping Dragon Plum, reckoned the most famous in Edo. Its low branches dipped into the soil and re-rooted as fresh trunks, spreading across some fifty feet square — the looping, ground-running limbs that earned the dragon's name. It stood in a Kameido garden of roughly 300 plums. A flood killed it in 1910.
Why it matters
The print Van Gogh painted in oil.
Thirty years on, in Paris, Vincent van Gogh copied this exact design in oil — brightening the colours and ringing the image with borders of Japanese characters lifted from other prints, used purely for decoration. The copy is among the clearest records of how Japanese woodblock prints reshaped the way Europe painted.
The characters have no coherent meaning; their function is primarily decorative.— Van Gogh Museum, on the borders of Van Gogh's copy
The file & the facts
- Title
- Plum Garden at Kameido
- Artist
- Utagawa Hiroshige
- Year
- 1857
- Medium
- Woodblock print
- Original
- 36 × 24.4 cm
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Rights
- Public-domain print · open access · Art Institute of Chicago — Clarence Buckingham Collection, 1925.3752 (CC0, courtesy)
- File
- sRGB · JPEG · 150–300 DPI
