River

A riverscape from Ono's industrial Tokyo, part of a sustained series in which he treated the city's waterways not as scenic settings in the Hiroshige meisho-e tradition but as working infrastructure: arteries lined with warehouses, factories, and the modest craft of urban labor. The composition likely sets a band of water against the silhouetted mass of riverbank structures, with the high-contrast black-and-white printing flattening the scene into graphic shapes. Mokuhanga registers reflections and water surfaces directly — the alternating bands of inked block and uninked washi reading as light and shadow on the river — and Ono exploits this with the directness characteristic of his 1930s output. The print belongs to a recurring subject in his oeuvre; rivers, particularly the Sumida and its tributaries, returned repeatedly as a way to organize the modern industrial cityscape into legible compositions, a thread that runs from his early proletarian-influenced prints through his later, more lyrical work.