Spring Snow

Spring Snow depicts the phenomenon of late seasonal snowfall — a wet, light snow that briefly covers blossoming branches or early green shoots before melting under warming sun. Ohtsu would likely have composed the scene around a single farmhouse, a stand of plum or cherry trees, or a path lined with bare and budding branches, with the snow rendered through unprinted areas of [washi](/glossary/washi) or pale gray [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) rather than heavy white pigment. The juxtaposition of cold white against the first warm tones of spring is a long-standing motif in Japanese landscape art, traceable through Hiroshige's snow scenes and refined by twentieth-century [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) and [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) artists. For Ohtsu, the subject sits naturally within his calendrical project of recording the agricultural year. Spring snow is brief and often inconvenient for farmers, but in this print it becomes a quiet image of the seasons overlapping — a transitional moment held in a medium that requires patient layering of blocks.