Dead field in winter

Dead Field in Winter belongs to a quieter strand of Koizumi's output, set apart from the populated topography of One Hundred Views of Great Tokyo. The title points to a landscape of withered grasses or harvested rice stubble under a winter sky, a subject in which the absence of foliage exposes the structural lines of the land. Koizumi's Western-style training in oil and watercolor inflected his handling of such subjects, encouraging tonal massing and atmospheric distance rather than the patterned flatness of earlier Japanese landscape prints. [Bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations would carry the muted register of the winter scene, applied with the close control his self-printing method allowed. Working in the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) tradition of jiga, jikoku, jizuri, he carried the design through carving and printing without a workshop intermediary, giving the surface a more painterly variation than divided-labor [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) prints. The subject also reflects the broader interest among early-twentieth-century Japanese printmakers in the seasonal melancholy that European landscape painters had long made into a genre.