No. 20: Rain on the Hiratsuka Plain near Kutsukake Station (Niju: Kutsukake no eki, Hiratsukahara uchu no kei), from the series "[Sixty-nine Stations of the] Kisokaido (Kisokaido [rokujukyu tsugi no uchi])"

Designed around 1830, this Keisai Eisen print from the celebrated series Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaido (Kisokaido rokujukyu tsugi no uchi) depicts the twentieth post-station, Kutsukake, set against the rain-swept expanse of the Hiratsuka Plain. The Kisokaido was the inland highway connecting Edo and Kyoto through the mountainous interior of Honshu, and Eisen contributed roughly twenty-four of the series' designs before the project was completed by Utagawa Hiroshige. Published by Takenouchi Magohachi (Hoeido), the series occupies a singular place in Edo ukiyo-e history as a counterpart to Hiroshige's celebrated Tokaido Road designs, showing the rougher, more weather-beaten landscapes of the mountain route. In this composition, Eisen renders a sudden downpour cutting diagonally across the plain, the travelers bent under straw raincoats and umbrellas as they push toward shelter. Although his reputation rests largely on bijin-ga, Eisen here demonstrates a confident command of landscape, using bokashi gradations to lay heavy gray clouds across the sky and parallel lines of woodblock-printed rain to flatten the middle distance. The horizontal format and low horizon line emphasize the openness of the terrain and the smallness of the figures within it, an approach that aligns Eisen's landscape sensibility with the new wave of meisho-e (famous-place pictures) emerging in the late 1820s and early 1830s. The print is preserved in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, which holds one of the most comprehensive sets of the Kisokaido series outside Japan, making it a valuable touchstone for studying Eisen's contributions to landscape ukiyo-e.