Hakone

The fourth Hakone variant suggests an extended engagement with the station's visual vocabulary, in keeping with Sekino's practice of producing serial impressions of central subjects. Across the Tokaido cycle the artist tested how few elements were needed to evoke a place: a band of mountain, a tile roof, a fragment of stone wall. Hakone's checkpoint and the Lake Ashi caldera offered ample raw material, and successive impressions allowed him to weigh one compositional emphasis against another — for instance, foregrounding the ridge silhouette in one state while pulling it back in favor of the foreground architecture in another. The carving, printing, and registration would all have been carried out by Sekino himself, the defining practice of sosaku-hanga as articulated by Onchi Koshiro and his circle in the prewar decades. The final surface, with its baren-burnished sheen on absorbent washi, retains physical evidence of the printing process that distinguishes this work from photomechanical reproductions and from the commercial nishiki-e of earlier centuries.