The archive / Ukiyo-e / Plum Garden at Kameido
Plum Garden at Kameido
Utagawa Hiroshige · 1797–1858
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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 borderless master is sharp at 300 DPI up to about A3. Every ratio also prints big-wall at 150 DPI for a step-back view — up to about 36″ on the short side, so the 24×36″ reaches 36×54″.
The work
A famous tree, seen from inside its branches.
From Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, this print pushes a single plum trunk hard into the foreground, cropped by the frame, while visitors stroll among blossoms in the distance. The bold composition and the saturated red sky — printed as a smooth gradient — flatten the space into something startlingly modern.
Look closer
The Sleeping Dragon Plum.
That trunk belonged to a real and celebrated tree, the Garyōbai or Sleeping Dragon Plum, held to be the most famous in Edo. Its low branches dipped into the soil and re-rooted as new trunks, spreading across an area some fifty feet square — the looping, ground-running limbs that earned it the dragon's name. It bloomed in a Kameido garden of about 300 plums until a flood killed it in 1910.
Why it matters
The print Van Gogh painted in oil.
Thirty years later in Paris, Vincent van Gogh copied this very design in oil, intensifying its colours and surrounding it with borders of Japanese characters borrowed — for purely decorative effect — from other prints. It is one of the clearest records of how Japanese woodblock prints reshaped European painting.
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
- Open access · personal use
- File
- sRGB · JPEG · 150–300 DPI
