Hashiba Ferry & Tile Films, Sumida River

Hashiba Ferry and Tile Kilns, Sumida River, recorded on ukiyo-e.org, depicts one of Utagawa Hiroshige's recurring east-bank subjects: the Hashiba crossing on the Sumida, where ferries carried travelers between the Asakusa and Honjo sides of the river, and the nearby tile and brick kilns whose smoke rose persistently above the bank. The composition belongs to the family of Edo ukiyo-e landscape prints, including a famous design in One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, in which Hiroshige uses the column of kiln smoke as a vertical element binding the river bank to the sky. Here ferries cross the foreground water; a few small huts and the conical roofs of kilns occupy the middle distance; and the rising smoke disperses into a bokashi-shaded sky. As with his other Sumida designs, the artist is concerned both with the topographical record of working Edo, the small industries along the river, the ferries that knit its banks together, and with the compositional possibilities offered by water, smoke, and sky. The print preserves a Sumida bank that has now been substantially altered by Meiji and twentieth-century redevelopment, and it stands among Hiroshige's most-cited treatments of an industrial river landscape in Edo.