Urawa — 支蘇路ノ駅 浦和宿

Urawa is a sheet from Keisai Eisen's most important landscape project, 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. Urawa - identified in the cartouche by its alternative name Kiso-ji no eki Urawa-juku - was the third station on the inland Kisokaido route between Edo and Kyoto, only a short journey from Nihonbashi but the first stop where the traveler felt fully outside the city's orbit. Eisen frames the station with the modest scale appropriate to its position: travelers on the road, the front of a teahouse or post-station building, and the open Musashi plain receding into the middle distance. The print is preserved in the ukiyo-e.org archive (Eisen Keisai, 69 Stations of the Kisokaido, Urawa). Impressions of Eisen's Urawa are held in the major Western ukiyo-e collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Kisokaido series is the reason Eisen is remembered today outside the bijin-ga tradition: as a landscape designer in the new mode opened up by Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, Eisen built the early sheets of the Kisokaido and helped lay the visual programme that Hiroshige then completed, in a project now regarded as one of the canonical road series of Edo ukiyo-e.