Sunset (Mount Fuji in a sea of clouds)

The subject draws on the meisho-e tradition that produced Hokusai's Thirty-six Views and Hiroshige's countless Fuji vistas, but Hagiwara — who grew up in Kofu, at the base of the mountain — handles it through the abstract idiom of his mature work. The peak's silhouette likely floats above a horizontal field of clouds rendered in layered bokashi, the warm reds and oranges of the sunset built up from multiple block impressions to achieve the translucency for which his prints are known. The seascape tag is figurative: Hagiwara treats the cloud field as a sea, an inversion long-standing in Japanese landscape imagery. The print registers a landscape known intimately from childhood through the formal vocabulary the artist developed across the Stone Garden and gemstone series — color-as-substance, surface-as-light — and so brings together meisho-e iconography and postwar abstraction. It belongs to the strand of his work in which Japanese subject matter is recovered, not abandoned, by abstract means.