Mt. Goryu

Mt. Goryu refers to one of the peaks in the Hakuba range of the Northern Japanese Alps, on the border of Nagano and Toyama prefectures, a serrated 2,814-meter mountain known for its long ridgelines and snow-streaked east face. For Maeda, whose landscape work tended toward the northern and the elemental, the high alpine subject offered a different register from his Hokkaido townscapes: pure topography, with no architecture or human incident to organize the picture plane. Sosaku-hanga treatments of mountains in this period — by Maeda's contemporaries such as Hiratsuka Un'ichi or Azechi Umetaro — typically reduced the subject to massed planes of carved color, with the grain of the woodblock allowed to register in the print as evidence of the maker's hand. The image would benefit from key blocks cut for the ridgeline silhouette and overlay blocks for snowfields and shadow, with washi absorbing the ink in a way that gives stone its weight. The print extends Maeda's catalog of Japanese landscape beyond the canonical meisho-e sites.