Forty-Eight Famous Views of Tokyo: Fireworks at Ryogoku

This view of the Ryōgoku fireworks, from Ikkei's 'Forty-Eight Famous Views of Tokyo' series of around 1871, depicts the annual midsummer fireworks display over the Sumida River at Ryōgoku Bridge — one of the great popular festivals of Edo and Tokyo and a meisho-e subject continuous from the late eighteenth century into the Meiji era. The Ryōgoku river opening (Ryōgoku no kawabiraki), traditionally held at the start of the summer river season, drew crowds of townspeople onto the bridge and onto pleasure boats below to watch the fireworks staged by the rival pyrotechnic houses of Tamaya and Kagiya. Ikkei renders the night sky with bursts of white and red fireworks against a dark indigo ground, the great wooden bridge crowded with figure silhouettes in summer kimono, and the boats below packed gunwale to gunwale on the water. The composition makes effective use of the contrast between the saturated festival reds in the lanterns and clothing and the deep night-sky indigo characteristic of early Meiji synthetic pigments. The print is part of the Edo-Tokyo Museum's collection and exemplifies how Ikkei's series carried the inherited iconography of the great Edo public festivals into the new urban frame of Tokyo.