Old North Church in Boston

This woodblock print depicts the Old North Church in Boston, the historic Anglican church in the North End from whose steeple lanterns were hung in April 1775 to signal the movement of British troops, an event immortalized in Longfellow's poem about Paul Revere's ride. The church's tall, white steeple rising above the surrounding brick buildings of the North End provides a strong vertical accent that Matsubara could carve with decisive clarity. Her mokuhanga technique transforms this icon of American colonial history into something unexpected: a Japanese woodblock print of a Boston landmark, forcing the viewer to see the familiar structure through the formal language of a different visual tradition. The carved lines strip the church to its architectural essentials, revealing proportions and spatial relationships that photographs and paintings tend to obscure.