Distant View of the Bridge over the Ina River at Nojiri

Distant View of the Bridge over the Ina River at Nojiri is one of Keisai Eisen's contributions to the great Kisokaido road series, the Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaido (Kisokaido rokujukyu-tsugi), which Eisen began publishing with Takenouchi Magohachi around 1835 and which was completed by Utagawa Hiroshige. Nojiri was the fortieth post-station on the inland Kisokaido route between Edo and Kyoto, set on the Ina River in the mountains of Shinano. Eisen frames the station from a distance: the bridge - the practical reason for the station's location - spans the river in the middle ground, while travelers, packhorses and porters move along the road in scale-reduced figures that allow the landscape to dominate. The print is among Eisen's strongest landscape designs and shows his absorption of the new full-landscape ukiyo-e idiom pioneered by Hokusai's Mount Fuji prints earlier in the same decade. The image reproduced here is preserved in the ukiyo-e.org archive sourced from Art of Japan, and impressions of Eisen's Nojiri are held in major Western collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the British Museum. The Kisokaido series is the principal reason Eisen is remembered today outside the bijin-ga tradition: it placed his name beside Hiroshige's on one of the canonical road-series projects of Edo ukiyo-e and showed that Eisen, normally associated with the floating world, could compose ambitious topographical views.