The snowy lake

The snowy lake is a Kasamatsu Mihoko-associated F12 woodblock landscape, catalogued on ukiyo-e.org under the Kasamatsu Shirō name; the attribution between father and daughter is one of the more ambiguous in the studio's output, since several snow-landscape designs of this period have circulated under both signatures. Whichever hand carved and printed the blocks, the print belongs to a particularly important strand of Japanese woodblock landscape: the snow scene.

Snow landscapes have a long history in the Japanese print, from Hiroshige's series of snowy meisho through the celebrated winter prints of Yoshida Hiroshi and the deeply atmospheric snow-evening compositions of Kawase Hasui. The combination of still water and snowfall is a particular favorite — the water absorbs and silences the falling snow, the snow softens the contour of the trees and shoreline, and the whole scene becomes a study in low-key tonal differentiation. In this print, the F12 format gives the composition room to develop these effects: a foreground bank or stand of trees in dark silhouette, a middle ground of frozen or quietly rippling lake, and a far shoreline visible through the snow as a graduated band of greys.

Technically, snow prints rely on the woodblock medium's distinctive capacity to leave the unprinted paper as the primary white. Rather than printing white pigment over a colored ground, the artist preserves the natural ivory of the washi and works around it with darker pigment, sometimes using gauffrage (karazuri — blind embossing) to suggest the texture of drifts. Whether handled by Mihoko or by her father in his late period, The snowy lake is a clear example of the postwar Kasamatsu studio working within the established Japanese vocabulary of the winter landscape print.