Lake Suwa from Shiojiri Pass

Dated around 1825, Lake Suwa from Shiojiri Pass is a landscape design by Keisai Eisen that depicts one of the most celebrated vistas along the Nakasendo, the inland highway running between Edo and Kyoto. From the Shiojiri Pass in present-day Nagano Prefecture, travelers could look down across Lake Suwa to the distant peaks of the surrounding mountains, and the view became a standard subject in early nineteenth-century [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e). Eisen organizes the composition in steep recession, with foreground travelers on the winding pass, a sweep of forested slopes leading the eye downward, and the flat silver-blue surface of the lake stretching out in the middle distance. Although Eisen is most often classified within Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) as a [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) master, this work belongs to a broader landscape practice he developed in the 1820s and continued in the Kisokaido series he began for the publisher Hoeido. His landscapes typically use [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradation to articulate distance and mood, and they show a sensitivity to seasonal light and weather that anticipates Hiroshige's later landscape style. The print is held in the John Stewart Kennedy Fund collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which preserves a representative group of Eisen's landscape designs alongside his bijin-ga prints. Understood alongside the Kisokaido series, this view of Lake Suwa documents Eisen's role in shaping the emergence of full-scale landscape ukiyo-e in the Bunsei era.