Miho

The title refers to Miho no Matsubara, the pine-covered peninsula on Suruga Bay long established in the [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) (famous place) tradition as a viewing point for Mount Fuji and as the setting of the Hagoromo legend, in which a celestial maiden's feathered robe is hung from a pine. Prints addressing this subject typically organize the composition around a foreground stand of black pines, the curve of the shoreline, and a distant view of Fuji, with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations used to suggest the haze of sea air separating the planes. As mokuhanga, the work would be printed from multiple cherry blocks onto [washi](/glossary/washi) using a [baren](/glossary/baren), with registration kentō marks aligning each color pass. Within the body of work attributed to Takahashi Hiromitsu, a Miho subject situates the artist in the long lineage of landscape printmakers who have returned to this site since the early nineteenth century, though the specific stylistic choices of this impression — palette, degree of abstraction, treatment of the pines — would need to be examined directly given the limited published documentation on the artist.