Shirahama Island

Shirahama (白浜, "white beach") is the name of several coastal locations in Japan, including sites in Wakayama Prefecture and on the Izu Peninsula. As a meisho-e subject — a print of a named place — "Shirahama Island" continues a category established in the Edo period and maintained through twentieth-century printmaking. A print of this title typically depicts a coastal view with characteristic rock formations, pine trees, or distant headlands, often using bokashi gradation across sea and sky to suggest atmospheric perspective. Composition in such landscape prints frequently employs horizontal banding, with foreground rocks or vegetation framing a middle-ground island silhouette beneath a graduated sky. The handling of water typically combines flat color blocks for the sea body with bokashi for surface modulation. Within Maeda Toshiro's documented output, landscape subjects appear alongside kacho-e and figural prints, suggesting an artist working across the conventional genre categories of mid-century Japanese woodblock practice. The print's exact place within his oeuvre cannot be located without firmer dating evidence.