Kuwagata Keisai's 'Sumida River Both Banks Picture Scroll'—On the Sumida River View Looking West (Summary of Kokka No. 1557 <Special Feature: Sumida River Picture Scrolls>)

Kazutaka Higuchi

Sumida River Both Banks Picture Scroll by Kuwagata Keisai, Otaru Art Village Ukiyo-e Museum, Hokkaido
Ink and color on silk, one handscroll, 36.7 cm in height, 401.1 cm in total length

Among the major artistic achievements of Kuwagata Keisai are a series of Edo landscape paintings, including the folding screens 'Edo Ichimoku-zu Byobu' (Tsuyama City Museum of History and Folklore) and 'Sumida River View Folding Screen' (Suntory Museum of Art). This article introduces the 'Sumida River Both Banks Picture Scroll' (Otaru Art Village Ukiyo-e Museum), produced around the fourth year of Bunsei (1821), and attempts to re-evaluate Keisai's Edo landscapes by comparing it with these two folding screens and other Edo maps.
With a composition looking west from the east bank of the river, the Sumida River traverses the extremely elongated horizontal surface of the picture scroll from upstream to downstream. While most picture scrolls depicting the Sumida River look east from the west bank, the composition of this work is the opposite. It begins with a depiction of Mount Tsukuba, passes Edo Castle with Mount Fuji in the background, and ends with a distant view encompassing the river mouth and the bay. Although there is a difference in format between a folding screen and a picture scroll, from the perspective of the motifs, the 'Sumida River Both Banks Picture Scroll' is derived from the lower section of the 'Edo Ichimoku-zu Byobu,' and the height of the viewpoint and the composition that places the Sumida River in a straight horizontal line are common to the 'Sumida River View Folding Screen.'
Keisai produced many 'Edo Ichimoku-zu' (Edo at a Glance) works looking west from the east, and they always included the Sumida River, capturing the Sumida River with its famous sites, the city, Edo Castle, and Mount Fuji in a single view. By looking west from Bokuto (east of the Sumida), the 'Sumida River Both Banks Picture Scroll' captures the Sumida River basin and the inner bay coastline while contrasting the urban and rural areas of the west and east banks; it depicts plateaus in the middle ground and famous sites and landmarks from Tsukuba to Fuji and Kazusa in the distance. This is in the context of the production consciousness of the series of 'Edo Ichimoku-zu,' and the selected famous sites reflect the Edo landmarks of the time of production. A unique motif in this work is Mount Tsukuba; this is the earliest example of a painting in which the Sumida River flows horizontally across the screen, with Fuji and Tsukuba placed on the left and right of the distant view. While it is impossible to see Tsukuba and Fuji in a single view directionally, by naturally moving the space and viewpoint horizontally from upstream to downstream along the flow of the river in the picture scroll format, the two famous mountains that can be seen from Edo are captured on the same screen seamlessly and without any sense of incongruity.