Mountain lake, Penketô, Hokkaidô

Penketô (Ainu for 'upper lake'), paired with the nearby Panketô, lies in the Akan-Mashū National Park of eastern Hokkaidô, surrounded by coniferous forest and volcanic ridges. Maeda's depictions of mountain lakes from his home island return to the dense, dark-green palette of Hokkaidô forests, often using broad expanses of [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) (gradated ink) for water surface and sky. The print likely employs the simplified planes and restrained registration typical of his sōsaku-hanga work, in which the artist himself cut and printed the blocks rather than relying on professional craftsmen. As a Hokkaidô native, Maeda treated these northern landscapes with a specificity uncommon in [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga), which tended toward the gentler scenery of Honshu. The lake subject fits a broader twentieth-century strain in mokuhanga that sought [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) (famous-place pictures) outside the Edo-era canon, extending the genre into Hokkaidô, the southern islands, and the modern frontier.