Old Karuisawa in summer

Old Karuisawa in summer depicts the Nagano-Prefecture mountain town of Karuizawa, a longtime resort destination at the foot of Mount Asama that drew Tokyo intellectuals and foreign missionaries from the late Meiji period onward. The composition likely presents a wooden village structure or street scene under summer foliage, executed in the simplified, plein-air manner that Maekawa favored for landscape work. Greens are typically built up through layered impressions, with bokashi gradations modeling the recession of forested hills and a pale, evenly inked sky. Architectural elements are reduced to flat planes and a few essential lines, and the keyblock often runs softer than in shin-hanga landscapes, giving the image a hand-drawn rather than engraved character. The summer designation suggests a focus on dense vegetation and full daylight rather than the snowbound or autumnal Karuizawa more commonly depicted by Maekawa's contemporaries. The print belongs to a broader sosaku-hanga interest in regional Japanese places treated without the formulaic conventions of earlier meisho-e topographic series.