View of Lake and Mt Fuji

View of Lake and Mt Fuji, recorded on ukiyo-e.org from the Japanese Art Online Database, places Seiler within the most heavily traversed iconographic territory in all of Japanese printmaking: the depiction of Mount Fuji from a lake. From Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji through the shin-hanga landscapes of Yoshida Hiroshi and Kawase Hasui, the symmetrical cone of the mountain reflected in or rising above a lake's surface has been an obligatory subject for any artist working in the Japanese landscape tradition. The five lakes of the Mount Fuji region, Kawaguchi, Sai, Motosu, Shoji, and Yamanaka, have been depicted countless times, and Seiler's contribution to this lineage participates as a foreign-born artist's act of homage to the canonical Japanese motif. As with Sailboat on the Ocean, the jaodb image filename for this work includes a cross-reference to the artist name Saito Hodo within its archival path, a reminder of the database's occasional cross-linking; the work is listed under Seiler on the source record. The composition would have offered Western collectors an immediately recognizable, instantly desirable image of Japan, and represents the kind of landscape work that complements Seiler's better-documented figural studies.