Funatsu

Funatsu (1928), held by the Art Institute of Chicago, depicts the small lakeside settlement of Funatsu on the shore of Lake Sai (Saiko) in Yamanashi Prefecture, one of the famed Fuji Five Lakes. The print belongs to a sustained body of work in which Hiroshi Yoshida turned again and again to Mount Fuji and the villages that ring it, observing the same mountain through different seasons, weathers, and hours of day. In Funatsu, Yoshida depicts a quiet moment along the lake edge, with reflective water and the great cone of Fuji rising behind the modest rooftops of the village. The composition demonstrates Yoshida's habit of balancing a lived human foreground—boats, fishing structures, low-roofed houses—against an idealized natural backdrop, a strategy that distinguished his shin-hanga landscapes from earlier ukiyo-e treatments of Fuji such as Hokusai's. The Yoshida studio, which Yoshida directed personally rather than working under a publisher in the manner typical of shin-hanga peers like Kawase Hasui, used an unusually high number of separate blocks here to achieve the soft layering of dawn or twilight color on the lake's surface. Yoshida's earlier training in Western oil painting at the Meiji Fine Arts Society shows in the careful aerial perspective: the mountain is rendered with the receding pale-blue tonality of a plein-air watercolor, not the flat decorative profile of ukiyo-e tradition. Funatsu is a foundational example of his Fuji vocabulary.