View of Magome Station from a Mountain Pass

View of Magome Station from a Mountain Pass is a sheet from Keisai Eisen's contributions to the Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaido (Kisokaido rokujukyu-tsugi), the great inland-road series Eisen began with Takenouchi Magohachi around 1835 and which was completed by Utagawa Hiroshige. Magome was the forty-third station on the Kisokaido, in the steeply terraced Kiso valley near the southern end of the mountain section, and is one of the most dramatic post-stations on the entire route. Eisen exploits the topography: rather than placing the station in the middle ground, he composes from a higher vantage point on the pass and looks down on the cluster of inns and the road as it descends into the valley. The composition gives the landscape itself - the receding mountains, the path threaded between them - the principal role, with travelers and packhorses reduced to scale-setting figures. The print is preserved in the ukiyo-e.org archive (Eisen Keisai, No Series, View of Magome Station from a Mountain Pass), and impressions of Eisen's Kisokaido sheets are held in major collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Kisokaido is the principal monument of Eisen's landscape work and stands alongside Hokusai's Mount Fuji and Hiroshige's Tokaido as one of the canonical road-series projects of late-Edo ukiyo-e.