Matsue, Izumo

This print depicts Matsue, the castle town of Shimane Prefecture on the San'in coast, historically part of Izumo Province. Hasui made multiple designs of this location, drawn to its canals, samurai districts, and the brooding presence of Matsue Castle. This version likely emphasizes the town's waterways or lakeside scenery along Lake Shinji, rendered through the graduated bokashi washes that define his atmospheric shin-hanga style. The Watanabe Shozaburo publishing house employed teams of skilled carvers and printers to execute Hasui's designs on washi paper, achieving subtle tonal transitions in sky and water impossible in earlier ukiyo-e printing. As a meisho-e — a print depicting a famous place — this design belongs to a long tradition of landscape documentation, updated here with a more intimate, modern sensibility influenced by Hasui's study of Western plein-air painting alongside his training under Kaburagi Kiyokata.