Riverbank

One of several Ono compositions returning to the urban riverbank as subject — likely depicting one of Tokyo's working waterways such as the Sumida or one of its industrial canals. Ono treats the riverbank not as picturesque meisho-e but as a structural problem: pilings, retaining walls, moored barges, and the hard horizontal of the embankment cut against the softer plane of water. Printed from a small number of blocks with restrained color, the work uses the grain of the woodblock and visible baren-tracking on flat areas as part of its surface, in keeping with sosaku-hanga values where the artist personally cuts and prints. The composition reflects the social-realist impulse that ran through Ono's 1930s work and persisted in his postwar production — the river depicted is a place of labor and infrastructure rather than leisure, akin in sensibility to the prewar factory scenes that first established his reputation within the Onchi circle and Ichimoku-kai.