River

A second variation on the river subject that recurred throughout Ono's career, this print likely takes a different vantage on the same urban waterway tradition — perhaps a bridge crossing, a stretch of embankment, or a moment of human activity at the water's edge. Where Hiroshige's meisho-e treated rivers as poetic prospects, Ono's mokuhanga treats them as a structural element of the working city, organizing the composition around horizontal water and vertical riparian structure. The high-contrast black-and-white printing reduces the scene to graphic essentials: water as planar white or evenly inked dark, bank-side buildings as silhouetted black mass, with the visible knife and chisel work registering directly on the washi. Ono's repeated returns to the river subject across decades — multiple compositions all titled simply River — indicate the patient, exhaustive observation that defined his practice and that he later applied to his historical studies of the sosaku-hanga movement.