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 (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, which tended toward the gentler scenery of Honshu. The lake subject fits a broader twentieth-century strain in mokuhanga that sought meisho-e (famous-place pictures) outside the Edo-era canon, extending the genre into Hokkaidô, the southern islands, and the modern frontier.