Summer landscape

Kawakami treats summer landscape with the same flat, graphic sensibility he brought to his Nanban subjects, refusing the atmospheric haze and gradient bokashi that shin-hanga printmakers used to evoke seasonal mood. The composition relies on stacked color planes—a green foreground, a flat sky, perhaps a structure or tree as a vertical accent—rather than aerial perspective or light effects. The carving leaves visible knife marks, and the printing, done by the artist himself on washi, accepts the slight inking and registration drift that hand-baren work produces. Within the sosaku-hanga movement, where landscape was often the dominant genre, Kawakami's contribution was to strip the form of its picturesque conventions and treat it as a formal arrangement of shapes and colors closer to folk-art signboards than to Hiroshige or Kawase Hasui. The print sits adjacent to his foreigner pictures as evidence that his idiom was a single consistent visual language applied across whatever subject matter came to hand.