Boat Ferrying Across River

Boat Ferrying Across River, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and dated about 1790 in the museum's records (a date earlier than Keisai Eisen's documented career and likely a cataloguing approximation rather than an attestable date), depicts the kind of routine river crossing that recurred in Edo landscape ukiyo-e through the nineteenth century. The Sumida, the Yodogawa, the rivers of the Tokaido and Kisokaido routes — Eisen worked along all of them at different points in his career. This print places a flat-bottomed ferry on a stretch of open water, with passengers carrying parcels and travelling staffs, and the far bank rendered in soft graduated blue tones. The composition is structured around the ferry's diagonal, a standard device that Eisen and his contemporaries used to balance horizontal river views. Foreground reeds, a thin band of clouds, and an indistinct distant landscape complete the setting. By the time Eisen was producing landscape work in volume, in the 1830s and 1840s, the river-ferry print had become a stock motif of the meisho genre, and his treatment is closer to the meditative mood of his Kisokaido contributions than to the more crowded ferry scenes of earlier ukiyo-e generations. The Met's holding represents the kind of unbranded or unattributed landscape sheet that filled the lower-priced end of the print trade; these were everyday images, sold at modest prices to ordinary Edo residents alongside the more elaborate large-format productions for the connoisseur market.