Hiroshige - Naruto's Whirlwinds in Awa

Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) was a Japanese draftsman, engraver and painter. He is known for his series of prints on Mount Fuji and Edo (now Tokyo), evocatively drawing the landscapes and atmosphere of the city, capturing moments of daily life in the city before its transformation in the Meiji era (1868-1912).

Naruto, which means "the noisy gate", is the eastern outlet of the Inland Sea of ​​Japan; in this famous strait, located off the coast of Awa province, between the islands of Awaji and Shikoku, the speed of the tides and the strength of the currents cause spectacular whirlpools, which make it a very popular tourist site.

Hiroshige was able to render, with perfect graphic mastery, these dizzying eddies at the foot of the reefs. The vertical format leads the master to adopt a very low point of view and to represent in close-up the spiral of a whirlpool among the foaming waves that break violently on protruding rocks. The contrast between the agitation of the waves and the peaceful lines of the island of Awaji at sunset imbue the composition with a dramatic tension.

By capturing both the instantaneity and the permanence of the whirlpools that repeat themselves there under the effect of the same phenomenon, by opposing them to the reefs in their immutability, Hiroshige symbolizes, through this "image of the floating world", to use the literal translation of the term ukiyo-e, both the ephemeral and the permanence, the immediacy and the eternity of our universe.