Hills of Naples

A landscape view of the hilly terrain that surrounds the Bay of Naples — Vomero, Posillipo, or the slopes running toward Vesuvius. Naples was a recurring subject for Ono, whose later career included foreign travel prints alongside his Tokyo-based work, and the Italian series sits within a wider postwar pattern of Japanese sosaku-hanga artists treating European cities as new meisho. Hill subjects give a printmaker a clear pictorial logic: stacked planes of receding terrain that translate naturally into successive blocks of flat color, with the key block carrying rooflines, terraced walls, and vegetation. Ono's mokuhanga technique would have used hand-pulled impressions on washi, likely with bokashi gradations to register Mediterranean light and atmospheric distance — a shift from the harder black-and-white contrasts of his 1930s industrial prints. The composition belongs to a mature phase in which Ono's earlier graphic directness was retained but tempered by a more chromatic, atmospheric range.