Landscape with Moon, from the Aomomiji (Blue Maple Leaves) series

Landscape with Moon, from the Aomomiji (Blue Maple Leaves) series, is a color woodblock print with silver powder produced by Tsuda Seifu around 1905 and held at the Rijksmuseum, where this impression is consulted through the museum's Wikimedia Commons holdings. The Aomomiji series followed Tsuda's eight-volume Zuan shu Collection of Designs as one of the inventive small format publications he produced for the Kyoto publisher Honda Ichijiro in the early years of the twentieth century. Where the Zuan shu albums had been purely ornamental, Aomomiji let Tsuda apply the same Meiji period decorative discipline to small pictorial subjects, and here he composes a nocturnal landscape around a single round moon suspended above a low horizon. The silver powder catches the light unevenly, giving the impression a soft cool luster that intensifies the night atmosphere, while the simplified contours and broad areas of flat color foreshadow the structural reduction Tsuda would later develop in his post Paris Cezannist oil paintings. The print belongs to the moment when Kyoto designers were absorbing Art Nouveau and pictorialist Western influences while retaining the woodblock traditions of the late Meiji publishing world, and the Rijksmuseum impression preserves both the silver pigment highlights and the disciplined keyblock that characterize the Honda publishing house's color woodblock production in these years.