Hakone — 箱根

Kiyochika's landscape print of Hakone depicts the volcanic mountain region southwest of Tokyo, a destination for travelers and artists throughout the Edo and Meiji periods. The area's dramatic scenery—crater lake, steep forested slopes, sulfurous vents, and intermittent views of Mount Fuji—made it a subject of ongoing interest in the woodblock tradition from Hiroshige's Tōkaidō series onward. Kiyochika approaches the subject with the atmospheric sensibility that defines his mature work, using softly graded bokashi passages to render misty mountain air or the diffuse light of an overcast day. His Hakone print departs from the sharply defined compositions of the Edo-period meisho-e tradition toward a more tonal, Western-influenced treatment of landscape, in which light conditions rather than topographical landmarks organize the pictorial space.