View of Lake and Mt Fuji

This Japanese woodblock print by Hodo Nishimura, 'View of Lake and Mt Fuji,' is documented in the Saito Hodo No Series through ukiyo-e.org's aggregation of the Japanese Art Open Database. Mount Fuji has been the single most recognizable subject in Japanese landscape printmaking since at least Katsushika Hokusai's 1830s 'Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji' and Utagawa Hiroshige's subsequent landscape series, and twentieth-century shin-hanga printmakers including Nishimura, Yoshida Hiroshi, Kawase Hasui, and others returned to the mountain repeatedly as both a national symbol and a compositional anchor. Pairing the mountain with one of the lakes in the Fuji Five Lakes region, Kawaguchi, Yamanaka, Sai, Shoji, or Motosu, generates the classic 'sakasa Fuji' or upright Fuji-with-water composition in which the cone of the mountain rises above a horizontal foreground of water, often reflecting a softened image of the peak itself. Shin-hanga printmakers achieved their characteristic atmospheric handling of such scenes through bokashi gradations, in which printers wiped pigments unevenly across the cherry-wood blocks to create gradients of sky, mist, and water. Nishimura worked within this twentieth-century revival of the collaborative ukiyo-e workshop system. The Saito Hodo No Series provenance ties the print to his documented body of work. As a Japanese woodblock print of Mount Fuji, the sheet stands within the most established lineage of Japanese landscape imagery.