View of the Ocean from the Benzaiten Shrine at Susaki in the Fukugawa District of the Eastern Capital

View of the Ocean from the Benzaiten Shrine at Susaki in the Fukugawa District of the Eastern Capital, recorded in the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is yet another in Takahashi Shotei's extended sequence of Susaki promontory designs. Susaki, the low sandy spit at Fukagawa on the east side of the Sumida, was crowned by a small shrine to Benzaiten, the goddess of music and water, and the precinct offered one of the cleanest open prospects of Edo Bay available within the city. Shotei, signing many sheets as Hiroaki, returns to the subject within the chuban landscape program of his publisher Watanabe Shozaburo, building the composition out of a foreground of shrine elements such as torii, fence or lantern, a band of water beyond, and a softly graded sky in the distance. The Chazen Museum's impression underscores how subtle changes in vantage, framing and palette let Shotei produce a series of related Susaki views without repeating any one design exactly. The shin-hanga revival's preference for bokashi-graded skies and reserved color is fully on display, and the persistent return to Susaki suggests how reliably Watanabe could expect the subject to sell, particularly to overseas collectors. Like many of Shotei's pre-1923 designs, the original blocks for this Susaki view were vulnerable to the destruction inflicted on Watanabe Shozaburo's stock by the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, which makes the impressions surviving in collections like the Chazen all the more important for documenting both the artist's individual cycle and the broader shape of the publisher's catalogue.