Neva Riverside

A view along the Neva, the river that runs through Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). The subject reflects the international travel that shaped Ono's later print production, and aligns with the leftist sympathies that had run through his 1930s work depicting urban workers and factory scenes; cultural exchange with the Soviet Union was a recurring path for Japanese artists of his political orientation in the postwar decades. Riverside subjects gave Ono an architectural frame — granite embankments, bridge piers, the geometry of a northern industrial waterfront — well suited to mokuhanga's capacity for blocked masses and flat planar color. The print likely combines a strongly drawn key block carrying the structural lines of quay, water, and skyline with broader color blocks for sky and river, possibly with bokashi gradations to register the diffuse northern light. It belongs to Ono's mature mode, in which the social documentary instinct of his prewar work translated into atmospheric foreign cityscapes.