Unuma Station: Distant View from Inuyama

At right are drawn the keep of Inuyama Castle on its stone walls, with the palace and gate in front and a red bridge. In the left foreground is a rocky outcrop with pines, between which the Kiso River flows blue with a small boat floating on it. Beyond, a white-gleaming river surface, houses, and yellow mountains continue.

The composition sets the castle high at the right and extends the river and distance toward the left. The indigo of the river, the red gradation of the sky, and the yellow of the mountains are vivid, and the gray of the castle's stone walls tightens the picture. The viewpoint is not of looking up at the castle but of looking down from a height.

Unuma was a post town of Mino on the north bank of the Kiso River, and to the south on the opposite bank stood Owari's Inuyama Castle. The title's "Seen from Inuyama in the Distance" can be read as a view looking far from the Inuyama side. Inuyama Castle was a castle where the Naruse family, hereditary senior retainers of the Owari domain, served generation after generation as lords, and it stands on a hill overlooking the Kiso River.

Eisen's design, it has no signature. Because the castle is the picture's protagonist, the Metropolitan Museum of Art titles this print "Unuma Castle." In depicting the castle on the opposite bank rather than the houses of Unuma-juku, it can be called an unusual design as a post-town picture.