Legion of Honor

This oban woodblock print is titled with a reference to the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco, indicating the work's institutional provenance rather than its subject matter. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, housed in the Legion of Honor building, hold significant Japanese print collections, and Kamei Tobei's work would fit naturally alongside other shin-hanga landscapes in their holdings. The institutional title obscures the print's original name, but the image itself would follow Kamei's established pattern of Kyoto-area views rendered with attention to atmospheric conditions and seasonal character. Museum provenance titles, while frustrating for identification purposes, document the migration of Japanese prints into Western collections, a story that parallels the shin-hanga movement's deliberate cultivation of international markets.