Summer Forest

A landscape of trees in full summer foliage, this print places Kawanishi within the sosaku-hanga tradition of seasonal landscape — a thread that runs from the late ukiyo-e meisho-e of Hiroshige into the shin-hanga of Hasui and Yoshida and the more avant-garde sosaku-hanga work of Kawanishi's generation. The summer treatment likely concentrates on dense greens, the play of light filtering through canopy, and the deep shadow of the forest floor. Kawanishi's manner reduces the scene to flat colour fields and confident shape rather than atmospheric gradation; what bokashi appears is typically restrained, employed for sky or distant ground rather than for the foliage itself. The print exemplifies the way sosaku-hanga printmakers continued the long Japanese tradition of season-specific landscape while replacing its decorative vocabulary with one shaped by Post-Impressionist and Fauvist colour.