Kyojin no Ato (Footprint of the Giant)

Kyojin no Ato (Footprint of the Giant), painted in 1912 and held in the Ina Cultural Hall (Ina Bunka Kaikan) in Nagano prefecture, the region of Fusetsu's ancestral Takatō domain, takes its subject from the East Asian legendary tradition surrounding the daidarabotchi, the gigantic mythological figure whose footsteps were said to have created the lakes and hollows of Honshū. The large horizontal oil shows the depression of a colossal footprint in a rolling moorland landscape, with a small group of human figures gathered at the rim and gazing into the hollow at the centre — a juxtaposition of the giant and the human-scale viewer that establishes the painting as a meditation on the relation of myth to natural history in a manner characteristic of Fusetsu's mature historical practice. Painted in the year of the Meiji Emperor's death and the opening of the Taishō era, the canvas combines Fusetsu's continuing engagement with the academic landscape technique he had absorbed in Paris with a deliberate return to the legendary subjects of his native Shinshū, and it occupies a central place in the Ina museum's collection of works by artists of the region.