Bridges do seem to be particularly print-o-genic, judging by the number of prints that I have found of bridges. Of course, the Brooklyn Bridge is particularly iconic–and there are a lot more excellent pictures of it than of most of the other NY city bridges (which is why I picked it for the week-long series) . Some of that reflects its age, of course–it’s the oldest of the East River crossings and one of the oldest in NYC that’s still in use.
When flipping through images from Hokusai’s famous series The 36 Views of Mount Fuji, my eye was caught by the print Sunset across the Ryogoku Bridge from the bank of the Sumida River at Onmayagashi. With this print, as with many others, there were many editions, printed from reproduced blocks, with different inks, over decades. Not surprisingly, the colors vary tremendously. I looked at a number of editions of this print, and finally honed in on one that seemed to capture all the colors well. Almost all of the them had rich blues and greens, but the orange-pink of the sunset was barely visible in most. (Perhaps that color faded more quickly than the other colors?)
When I started reading about the Ryogoku bridge, there were many references and numerous pictures spanning the centuries. It is one of many bridges in Tokyo, but it dates back to the 17th century. I think it qualifies as a reasonable analog to the Brooklyn Bridge. I am not proposing to do a week of prints of the Ryogoku Bridge (though there are more than enough to do months!), but in addition to the one print that I was planning to share, I will include a few others.
In the original Hokusai Sunset print, I love the texture of the water aft of the boat, as well as how the sunset diffuses out behind the bridge, the mountain and the distant land.
If you have clicked through to the WordPress blog, then you can click on any of the images and get a magnified gallery with captions, which allows you to scroll through the images one by one, and you can zoom in on any of them as you would on any image on a web page.
