Untitled

A shin-hanga landscape print by Kawase Hasui, possibly depicting an autumn foliage scene at a temple, mountain pass, or garden. Hasui's autumn compositions are among his most chromatically varied, employing reds, oranges, and yellows against cool grey stone walls or dark timber structures. The reddening of hillside maples were subjects he visited at temples, mountain villages, and meisho locations throughout Japan. Compositional structure typically involves a diagonal recession into depth, anchored by an architectural element or a stand of trees in the immediate foreground. The printer's workshop would have required a significant number of impressions plus multiple color blocks to achieve nuanced gradation between warm foliage tones and cooler architectural and atmospheric areas. Such autumn meisho-e prints were commercially popular and satisfied collector demand for seasonal landscape imagery within the shin-hanga publishing system.