Vesper Bells at Ueno

Vesper Bells at Ueno (Ueno banshokei or similar) is a Keisai Eisen sheet that adapts one of the most familiar landscape categories of the East Asian tradition - the evening bell - to the Edo neighbourhood of Ueno. The bell of Kan'eiji, the great Tokugawa-sponsored Tendai temple complex on Ueno hill, was one of the city's official time-keeping bells and was the obvious counterpart in Edo to the temple bells that anchored the original Chinese Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang and the naturalised Japanese Eight Views of Omi. Eisen's design works in this lineage. The print sets a foreground figure or pair of figures against a middle-ground view of the temple precinct at dusk, with the bell tower (shoro) implied or visible above the trees. The composition is built around the controlled use of evening tones: deepening indigos, warm ochres and the careful reservation of unpigmented paper for the parts of the sky that remain light. The image is preserved in the ukiyo-e.org archive sourced from Art of Japan. Eisen's Ueno banshokei demonstrates the close fit between Edo ukiyo-e landscape and the classical eight-views framework, and it sits alongside the contemporary Hokusai and Hiroshige experiments in turning the city itself into a series of canonical landscape moments.