Snow in Matsushima

Snow in Matsushima, an undated woodblock by Okuyama Gihachiro (1907-1981), engages one of the three classically designated scenic views of Japan (the nihon sankei) through the artist's distinctive [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) (creative print) idiom. Matsushima Bay, with its scattered pine-clad islets off the Tohoku coast, has been a celebrated subject in Japanese painting and poetry for centuries, and the print enters that long tradition while reframing it in fully twentieth-century terms. Snow gives Okuyama, a self-taught printmaker from Akita who specialized in snow-bound northern scenes, a natural opportunity to exploit his bold-color vocabulary: the islets and pine groves register as weighted dark masses against the cold reserved tones of snowed-over rock and the chilled water of the bay. The composition is structured rather than panoramic, with the dramatic perspective and firmly bounded planes of color that signature his mature work. A Tohoku regional figure in the predominantly Tokyo-and-Kyoto sosaku-hanga movement, Okuyama designed, carved, and printed each impression himself, in keeping with the movement's foundational principle that the artist alone be responsible for every stage of production. The Japanese Art Open Database, through [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org, preserves this impression alongside other Okuyama prints in its record (https://ukiyo-e.org/image/jaodb/Gihachiro_Okuyama-No_Series-Snow_in_Matsushima-00033507-030127-F12). For students of Okuyama Gihachiro, the Matsushima print is particularly useful for the way it demonstrates how comfortably the artist could absorb a canonical Tohoku-region viewing subject into his personal idiom, treating the famous bay not as a panorama to be diagrammed but as an opportunity for the kind of weighted, planar snowscape that characterizes his Akita farmhouse and village work.