Early Spring at a Southern Lake

Early Spring at a Southern Lake, dated 1906 and part of Hokkai's celebrated hundred-landscapes series, depicts a low, broad lakeshore as the first warmth of the year begins to thaw the surrounding hills. The composition uses a wide horizontal format that recalls Chinese album-leaf landscapes more than the conventional vertical kakemono, opening a panoramic view in which the soft pink and pale green wash of awakening vegetation runs in a thin band along the middle of the silk. The water is suggested by the merest tonal shift, almost the bare ground of the silk itself, while distant mountains rise in pale silhouette against a luminous sky. Hokkai's brushwork in the foreground trees is unhurried and analytic, with each species — willow, plum, pine — distinguishable through its silhouette in a way that betrays his forester's habit of identification. The work entered the Freer Gallery in 1976 with the larger Taniguchi gift and is among the most lyrical of his seasonal scenes.