Riverside road

A meisho-e subject — the place-pictures that have organised Japanese landscape printmaking since Hokusai and Hiroshige — refracted through Ono's twentieth-century sosaku-hanga sensibility. A riverside road suggests a horizontal composition with the road carrying the eye laterally and the river running parallel, the two lines defining a narrow strip of inhabited ground between water and surrounding land. In Ono's hands such a subject typically loses the topographical specificity of Edo-period meisho-e and becomes a generalised structural motif: parallel zones of carved texture, with figures or vehicles either absent or reduced to small graphic accents. Ono was a leading historian of the sosaku-hanga movement as well as a practitioner, and his landscape prints can be read as deliberate continuations of a Japanese tradition into a self-carved, self-printed idiom. The road and river framework also recalls his earlier interest in the everyday infrastructure of the prewar industrial landscape.