Ferry boat crossing the Sumida River, from the album "Friends of the Three Capitals (Santo no tomoe)"

Ferry boat crossing the Sumida River appears in the album Friends of the Three Capitals (Santo no tomoe), a surimono project Totoya Hokkei designed in 1832 to bring together poets from Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka, the three principal urban centers whose poetic communities maintained close exchanges throughout the late Edo period. The album format allowed an extended sequence of images and inscriptions to be enjoyed in succession, with each plate showcasing a scene that opened space for the verses contributed by the participating kyoka poets. The Sumida River, the great waterway of Edo, was an obvious symbol of the host city; the ferry boat scene evokes a quintessential Edo experience and announces the local identity of one of the contributing groups. Hokkei composes the scene with the spare landscape sense he learned in the Hokusai school workshop, balancing figures aboard the boat against the slow horizontal of the river. The deluxe production typical of surimono is in evidence throughout the album, with refined registration, careful gradations, and rich coloring matched to the literary ambitions of the patrons. As a Hokusai pupil, Totoya Hokkei excelled at projects of collaborative scope, and the Santo no tomoe album exemplifies the social function of surimono as instruments of friendship across cities and across poetry circles. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression under accession entry 81006, allowing modern viewers to study a sheet whose original meaning depended as much on the bonds of poets in three capitals as on the visual subject Hokkei chose to depict.