Snow Overnight at Shinobugaoka

Snow Overnight at Shinobugaoka is a winter view by Keisai Eisen of the elevated terrain at the northeast edge of Edo, on the hill called Shinobugaoka above Shinobazu Pond. The site, dominated by the great Kan'eiji temple complex founded by the Tokugawa, was one of the principal scenic and seasonal landmarks of the city and was repeatedly treated in Edo ukiyo-e under its winter aspect. Eisen's design uses the standard ukiyo-e vocabulary for snow: heavy, evenly distributed flakes on the temple roofs, thick mounds of white on the bare branches of the pines, and figures bundled into hooded outer robes as they move along the path. The composition emphasises the contrast between the broad white masses of snow and the dark architecture and figures, an effect that depended on the careful registration of the woodblocks and on the printers' use of unpigmented paper to read as white. The print is preserved in the ukiyo-e.org archive (Eisen Keisai, No Series, Snow Overnight at Shinobugaoka). As with much of Eisen's landscape work, the sheet belongs to the same conceptual project as Hokusai's Mount Fuji and Hiroshige's Tokaido and Edo views - the discovery, in the late 1820s and 1830s, that ukiyo-e could compose entire prints around the city itself, with its inhabitants reduced to weather-figures inside a larger pictorial space.