Mt Asama

A view of Asama-yama, the active stratovolcano on the Nagano–Gunma border whose plume has been a fixture of regional landscape since the medieval period. Okuyama's print probably shows the mountain from one of the standard vantage points on the Karuizawa side, with the conical peak rising over forested or cultivated foreground and a column of volcanic vapor drifting from the summit crater. As a landscape printmaker rooted in the volcanic terrain of Dewa, Okuyama returned repeatedly to the major peaks of central and northern Japan, using bokashi gradation to model the slopes and atmospheric distance and reserving the key block for the silhouette of the cone and the edge of the plume. The composition belongs to the mountain-portrait genre that runs from Hokusai's Fugaku Sanjurokkei through Yoshida Hiroshi's Twelve Scenes of the Japanese Alps and into the sosaku-hanga generation, each artist treating these peaks as fixed motifs against which seasonal and atmospheric variation could be recorded.