The Monkey Bridge

The Monkey Bridge is a color woodblock print by Katsushika Taito II dated to the early 1830s and held by the Cleveland Museum of Art. The print depicts the Saruhashi or Monkey Bridge in Kai Province, one of Japan's three most celebrated bridges, suspended without center pillars over a precipitous gorge. The site was a recurring subject for nineteenth-century landscape designers, including Hokusai himself, who treated the bridge in several compositions. Taito II's version emphasizes the dramatic verticality of the gorge: the bridge's slender span crosses the upper portion of the print, with the cliffs falling sharply away beneath and the river running through the bottom of the composition. Travelers cross as small figures, scaled to convey the immense drop. The Cleveland Museum's open-access catalogue records the print as one of the artist's substantive landscape works, distinct from his more numerous surimono. Comparison with the Art Institute's harimaze section of the same subject suggests that Taito II returned to the Saruhashi more than once during his active career.