The Onmayagashi Crossing

The Onmayagashi Crossing is an 1857 landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858), produced in the final year before his death and at the height of his late mastery of Edo ukiyo-e. Onmayagashi was the name given to a stretch of the Sumida River bank in Edo where ferries crossed between the eastern district of Honjo and the western city. The term referred to government stables that had once stood nearby, and the embankment was a busy and picturesque part of the riverfront, lined with riverside dwellings and boat landings where small ferries shuttled passengers from one side to the other. Hiroshige treats the subject with the compositional inventiveness that distinguishes his late work, framing the crossing through carefully chosen foreground elements that emphasize the human and architectural detail of the riverside while leaving the water itself open as a broad central field. As a landscape print, The Onmayagashi Crossing belongs to the late inventory of Edo locations that Hiroshige assembled in his final years, the project that culminated in the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. These prints treat the city as a sequence of named places worthy of memorialization, each rendered with the seasonal and atmospheric specificity that distinguishes Hiroshige from earlier meisho-e designers. The 1857 date places this work near the end of his life and within the same creative current as that final series. The impression is preserved in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, which holds substantial materials documenting Hiroshige's late Edo subjects.