Fuji from a Desolate Field

Fuji from a Desolate Field is a Japanese woodblock print by the Austrian artist Fritz Capelari, designed during his collaboration with the Tokyo publisher Watanabe Shozaburo. The composition presents Mount Fuji rising in the distance beyond a foreground of open, untended ground, treating the iconic peak through the eye of a European trained painter rather than through the established conventions of nineteenth century [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e). Capelari was among the very first foreign artists Watanabe Shozaburo invited to participate in the emerging [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) ("new prints") movement, and prints like this one helped Watanabe demonstrate that the collaborative woodblock workshop could translate the sensibility of a modern Western draftsman into the disciplined medium of carved and printed blocks. Capelari's drawing is loose and atmospheric, relying on broad zones of soft color rather than the linear black contours typical of earlier Japanese landscape prints. The desolate foreground reads as a quiet, almost melancholy stage from which Fuji emerges, and the carver and printer have preserved the painterly hesitations of the original drawing through gradated [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) color and unfussy block work. The 1915 group of Capelari designs published by Watanabe is widely treated by scholars as a foundational moment in shin-hanga: it predates the better known later collaborations with Hiroshi Yoshida and Kawase Hasui, and it shows Watanabe testing how far the traditional Japanese print workshop could stretch around a non Japanese aesthetic. This impression is documented through Scholten Japanese Art and is catalogued on ukiyo-e.org, which preserves a digital record of the design for researchers and collectors. The print rewards close looking for the way it folds a European landscape sketch into the materials and craft of the Japanese woodblock tradition.