Toto Ryogoku no fukei

Toto Ryogoku no fukei, 'View of Ryogoku in the Eastern Capital,' is preserved in the British Museum's holdings and represents Takahashi Shotei's engagement with another canonical Tokyo subject. Ryogoku, the area where the Ryogoku Bridge crossed the Sumida and the summer fireworks famously lit up the river, had been a staple of Edo-period ukiyo-e and continued to attract designers into the shin-hanga era. Shotei, signing as Hiroaki, treats the location in the calm atmospheric mode he developed with the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo. The composition characteristically pairs a long stretch of riverbank or bridge with a soft sky achieved through bokashi pulls, and a band of boat traffic on the water rendered in restrained gradations. The chuban landscape format keeps the scene intimately scaled, and the deliberate use of 'Toto' as part of the title situates the design within the older meisho language that connects shin-hanga to its Edo precedents. The British Museum's impression demonstrates how Shotei's Tokyo subjects circulated abroad: collectors and institutions interested in the visual culture of the old city often acquired sets of his prints because they spoke to both the modern moment and a remembered, more poetic Edo. With many of Watanabe Shozaburo's original blocks for the pre-1923 catalogue destroyed in the Great Kanto earthquake, surviving Ryogoku impressions in major museums help fill in our picture of the shin-hanga revival's mapping of Tokyo's most charged water-bound sites.