Awaji island, Izu

The title locates this print on the Izu coast, where Kasamatsu drew repeatedly through the 1930s and again after the war—Atami, Ito, and Shimoda all appear in his catalogue. The island view likely combines a foreground rocky shoreline or pine-covered headland with the distant island silhouette across a strait, a meisho-e formula that Hokusai and Hiroshige had codified in Edo and that the shin-hanga generation reanimated for the twentieth-century collector. Compositional details one would expect: a bokashi sky above a flatter band of sea, with the island handled in two or three flat tonal passages cut on separate blocks; foreground rocks given more keyblock weight to anchor the design; and a pale gradation along the waterline where wave foam meets shore. Izu and the wider Pacific coast were a sustained subject for Kasamatsu, who shared this geography with his Kiyokata-school contemporaries Kawase Hasui and Ito Shinsui—each of whom produced their own treatments of the same coast in the same decades.