Teahouse by the Pond (Ike no chaya)

Ike no chaya (Teahouse by the Pond), preserved in the Library of Congress (LC 2008660534), is among Uehara Konen's quieter genre landscapes. The print depicts a small wooden teahouse perched at the edge of a still pond, with willow branches softening the foreground and a low distant horizon suggesting open countryside beyond. The composition is organized around the warm lamp-lit interior of the teahouse, a single rectangle of yellow ochre glow that anchors the picture against the surrounding cool greens and blues of the pond and foliage. Konen's drawing of the architectural detail — the rafters, the shoji screens, the eaves — is precise but understated, in the Maruyama-Shijō shorthand inherited from Suzuki Kason. The treatment of the water is handled in a delicate bokashi gradation from a darker blue near the foreground to a paler cream near the horizon, suggesting evening light without overdetermining the time of day. The print belongs to the small-format genre landscape group that Konen produced in the first decade of the twentieth century, prefiguring the atmospheric domestic-life subjects that would become a central preoccupation of the shin-hanga movement under Hasegawa-Nishinomiya and Watanabe Shōzaburō. The Library of Congress impression preserves a clean registration and the warm ochre lamp accent intact.