Susaki, from a series of New Uki-e

Watanabe Seitei (1851-1918) stands among the most influential Meiji-era painters and designers, and works attributed to him within the New Uki-e tradition show how the conventions of Edo-period woodblock perspective prints carried forward into the early twentieth century. "Susaki, from a series of New Uki-e" depicts the low-lying coastal district of Susaki at the eastern edge of Tokyo Bay, a stretch of reclaimed land long associated with the Benten shrine and the wide tidal flats that captivated Edo printmakers from Hiroshige onward. The composition revisits the classical uki-e formula of receding parallel lines and a deep one-point vanishing perspective, a Western-influenced device Japanese artists first absorbed in the eighteenth century and continued to update during the Meiji modernization. Seitei, who trained in the Maruyama-Shijo lineage and traveled to Paris for the 1878 Exposition Universelle, was unusually well placed to translate that hybrid pictorial language for a new audience hungry for views of the changing capital. His Nihonga sensibility, refined through years of producing celebrated bird-and-flower prints and Meiji [kacho-e](/glossary/kacho-e) designs, here gives way to a topographic landscape steeped in the soft tonal washes for which he was admired. The print belongs to a broader transitional moment when [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) publishers were experimenting with revivalist series that recombined older subjects, perspective techniques, and modern sensibilities. This impression is documented in the public catalogue at ukiyo-e.org, which preserves the image for ongoing study of Seitei's wider graphic output beyond his kacho-e specialty.