Utagawa Hiroshige made this woodblock print in 1857 for his last great series, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. He died the following year. The place is Sakasai, a ferry crossing on the edge of Edo, and the subject is not the ferry at all. Four white egrets fill the foreground: two swoop low over the water on the left, and two stand among the reeds at the bottom right. A small boat crosses the river in the distance, and thatched roofs sit under a stand of trees beneath a pale orange sky.
The bold, cropped composition is typical of the series. Hiroshige put a large foreground object close to the viewer and let the landscape fall away behind it, a trick he used in many of the Edo views. The effect is of looking at a scene, not at a map. A band of deep blue in the water, shaded to nearly white where the river catches light, was printed using a technique called bokashi, in which the printer wipes the ink on the block to make a gradient.
Hiroshige's work was a major source for Western artists once Japanese prints reached Europe. Vincent van Gogh copied two prints from this same series in oil in 1887, the plum garden at Kameido and the sudden shower over Shin-Ohashi bridge.
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