Lumberyard

Lumberyard depicts a Japanese timber yard, the kind of working industrial subject that distinguished Hakutei's print output from the more conventional meisho-e (famous places) tradition. Stacked beams, working figures, and the geometric rhythm of cut timber would have offered Hakutei the pictorial structure he favored — flat planes, diagonal recession, and the muted browns and ochres achievable in mokuhanga through carefully layered impressions on washi. As a co-founder of the Nihon Sosaku Hanga Kyokai in 1918, Hakutei embraced subjects drawn from working Japan rather than the bijin-ga or yakusha-e imagery of the ukiyo-e past. The print reflects his training under Kuroda Seiki at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, where he absorbed Western pictorial conventions of perspective and tonal modeling and adapted them to the constraints and strengths of woodblock — flat color areas, contour lines, and the textural grain of the block that survives into the printed sheet. Lumberyard sits among the modern Japanese subjects Hakutei produced from the 1910s onward.