O Fuji San

Mount Fuji, the most iconic subject in Japanese printmaking history, receives Bertha Lum's interpretation in this 1907 color woodcut. The honorific "O Fuji San" reflects the mountain's revered status in Japanese culture — at once a sacred site, a national symbol, and an inexhaustible subject for artists from Hokusai and Hiroshige to the shin-hanga masters. Lum's version, made just four years after her first visit to Japan, inevitably engages with this massive artistic legacy. Her Western perspective brings a slightly different spatial sensibility to the composition — perhaps a greater emphasis on the mountain's physical mass rather than its symbolic resonance. The color woodcut technique, with its capacity for flat color planes and precise edge definition, suits Fuji's geometric profile particularly well.