Foot of Mountain in Spring

Foot of Mountain in Spring is a Kasamatsu Mihoko woodblock landscape recorded on the ukiyo-e.org index through a participating dealer's catalogue. The title positions the print squarely in the tradition of seasonal landscape mokuhanga: not a vista from a famous viewpoint, but the quieter motif of the lower slopes of a mountain at the moment of spring's onset, when the cherry, plum, and the new green of leaves begin to break the grey-brown of the dormant winter hillside.

This is a subject deeply rooted in Japanese landscape painting and printmaking. Yamabuki (mountain spring) imagery appears in handscrolls, screens, and prints from the Heian period onward, and within the woodblock tradition it was carried into the modern era by shin-hanga landscape artists such as Hiroshi Yoshida, Kawase Hasui, and — directly relevant here — Kasamatsu Shirō, whose 1950s and 1960s prints frequently turned to remote mountain villages, hot-spring towns, and the edges of cultivated countryside. As a print attributed to Mihoko, Foot of Mountain in Spring continues this strand of her father's mature interests rather than the urban or coastal scenes of his prewar career.

Formally, mokuhanga is well suited to such imagery: gradated woodblock printing can render the cool blue-grey of distance, the muted ochre of dormant terraces, and the soft pinks and pale greens of new spring growth without the harsh transitions that oil paint can introduce. A successful spring-mountain print depends on the artist's command of subtle bokashi and on the careful registration of multiple lightly-pigmented blocks. As an intimate F-format sheet on the secondary market, this print can be read as part of Mihoko's continuation of the postwar Japanese rural-landscape mokuhanga tradition, in which the changing seasons in the countryside became one of the steadiest and most marketable subjects for artists working outside the major commercial publishers.