Moon At Sekiguchi

Sekiguchi lies along the Kanda River in northwestern Tokyo, a district historically known for the Bashoan hermitage, the Sekiguchi waterworks, and the slope down to the river crossing. This print places that locale under moonlight, a nocturne subject Shotei treated repeatedly across his career. The composition almost certainly centers on the disc of the moon set into a deeply gradated sky, achieved through carefully registered bokashi pulled from dark indigo at the upper edge to a paler band at the horizon. Riverbank trees, a footbridge, or the silhouette of a roofline would be silhouetted in flat black or near-black against this graduated ground, with reflections doubling the moon on the water. Shotei's moonlit views form a coherent strand within his work for Watanabe Shozaburo, drawing on the ukiyo-e tradition of moon prints by Hiroshige and Yoshitoshi while simplifying the line work and intensifying atmospheric gradation, hallmarks that aligned his practice with the emerging shin-hanga movement.