Moonlight on Mt. Fuji, Japan

Held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum (accession 1984.65) and dated by the museum to circa 1920-1929, Moonlight on Mt. Fuji, Japan is one of Lilian May Miller's most reproduced prints and the work by which she is most frequently introduced to American audiences. The horizontal color woodcut on paper, approximately 24.3 by 36.5 cm, shows the cone of Mount Fuji rising behind a foreground band of pine-clad foothills and a quietly reflective body of water, the whole scene rendered in the cool blue-grey palette of a moonlit night. Miller produced the image during the period in which she was working out of her Tokyo and Kyoto studios under the artist-name Gyokka, drawing on the same conservative shin-hanga vocabulary of nocturnal mountain views that Watanabe Shōzaburō was simultaneously commissioning from Kawase Hasui and Itō Shinsui. What distinguishes Miller's version is the technical fact that she cut and printed it herself — the registration of the blue-and-grey gradations, the gauffrage-like detail of the foreground pines, and the soft moonlight gradient all bear the marks of an artist trained from childhood in the Kanō atelier and able to perform the full woodblock workflow without recourse to professional block-carvers. The Smithsonian acquired the impression in 1984 as part of its systematic effort to build out the Western shin-hanga holdings, and it has become one of the most reproduced images on the SAAM site.