Lake Haruna

Lake Haruna, a caldera lake on Mount Haruna in Gunma Prefecture, was a frequent destination for artists and tourists during the Taisho and early Showa periods, celebrated for its mountain reflections and forested shoreline. Nouët's print likely captures the lake's characteristic stillness — the volcanic summit of Haruna-Fuji, a secondary cone rising from the caldera rim, mirrored in the calm water surface — a composition type with precedents in both Western landscape painting and Japanese meisho-e. The surrounding deciduous and conifer forest would provide seasonal color interest, with autumn foliage offering rich ochres and crimsons achievable through careful color-block registration. The subject allowed Nouët to engage with the kind of mountain-and-water landscape central to his broader practice, including his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji series, bringing a European landscape painter's attention to spatial recession and atmospheric depth within the conventions of Japanese printmaking.