Mt. Myogi-san

Mount Myōgi in Gunma Prefecture is one of Japan's three strange mountains (Nihon sankidai), known for jagged, eroded volcanic ridges that rear up in vertical pinnacles unlike the conical profiles of Fuji or Bandai. The mountain has been a subject for Japanese landscape art since the Edo period — Hokusai included it in his series of waterfall views — and Maeda's print extends that tradition into the twentieth-century print revival. A composition of Myōgi typically pushes the mountain toward the upper register, exploiting its silhouette of fingered peaks against open sky, with forest or rice fields below for scale. Maeda's keyblock would carry the burden of the ridgeline's geometry — sharp angular cuts rather than the soft contour favored for round volcanic peaks — and the color blocks could be reduced to flat washes of slate, ochre, and pine green. The print belongs among his meisho-e of dramatic Honshu landscape and demonstrates the geographic range of his catalogue beyond the Hokkaido subjects most associated with him.