Mt Daimonji

This second treatment of Daimonji-yama indicates that Nomura, or his publisher, considered the mountain worth revisiting under different conditions -- a common practice in shin-hanga, where designers issued seasonal or temporal variants of a recognized site. The print likely differs from its companion in season, weather, or time of day: a snow-capped winter view, a twilight reading with the city below in shadow, or a clear summer rendering in advance of the August fire ceremony. Each variant required its own keyblock and color blocks, with the mountain's silhouette held constant while sky, foreground, and tonal balance shifted. The decision to issue paired views of a single landmark reflects the shin-hanga publishers' practice of building catalogues around recognizable Kyoto subjects. Within Nomura's recorded output, the doubled Daimonji entries underline the centrality of Kyoto's eastern hills to his landscape repertoire and to his publisher's commercial program.