Gas lamp from Boston - Kyoto

The title indicates a print pairing a Western-style gaslight in Boston with a similar lamp in Kyoto, likely one of those ornamental Meiji-era cast-iron standards that survives in pockets of older entertainment districts such as Pontocho or Kiyamachi. The pairing reflects Karhu's bicultural perspective: a Minnesota-born artist who saw Kyoto's gas lamps as cousins to those of his own country's nineteenth-century cities. Compositionally, the print probably isolates the lamp standard against a flat ground, with the decorative scrollwork of the bracket and the cast shadow providing the linear interest Karhu more often derived from temple beam-and-post construction. The subject is an unusual one within his body of work — most of his Kyoto views concentrate on indigenous structures — and represents one of the moments where his outsider's eye becomes visible in his choice of motif, identifying the imported Meiji street furniture embedded in Kyoto's fabric as worthy of the same disciplined mokuhanga treatment he gave the city's temples and machiya.