Town Snow Scene

This colour woodblock print of the Shōwa period depicts a town in heavy snow — almost certainly the artist's native Akita city, with its low wooden buildings, narrow streets, and roofs deep in the wet northern snowfall characteristic of the Sea of Japan coast. The composition treats the snow as both a visual and atmospheric subject, exploiting the soft greys and whites against the dark verticals of the wooden townscape. Snow is the single most pervasive subject of Katsuhira Tokushi's output: living in one of the snowiest regions of Honshū, he returned repeatedly to the visual problems posed by the long northern winter, and his snow prints constitute one of the most substantial bodies of winter imagery in mid-twentieth-century Japanese printmaking. The print was produced in the strict jiga-jikoku-jizuri (self-designed, self-carved, self-printed) procedure of the sōsaku-hanga movement and exemplifies the close attention to material texture — wet roof tiles, fresh snow, the dark shop fronts beneath — that distinguishes Katsuhira's snowscapes from the more atmospheric handlings of his Tokyo contemporaries.