Park Scene

The print situates the viewer within one of Tokyo's public parks, the kind of ward-administered green space that became part of the modern urban fabric during the Meiji and Taisho eras. Koizumi's compositional habit in such subjects is to anchor the image with a specific path, bench, or stand of trees rather than a generalized vista, treating the park as a particular topographic place rather than generic landscape. Color is applied in flat, registered planes typical of mokuhanga, with subtle bokashi gradations in the foliage masses and sky. As with the rest of his hand-printed output, the slight unevenness of inking betrays the baren rubbed by the artist himself rather than a professional printer's mechanical regularity. Park subjects sit alongside the temples, bridges, and waterways that constitute Dai Tokyo Hyakkei (One Hundred Views of Great Tokyo, 1928-1940), Koizumi's sustained documentary survey of the capital's varied urban textures.