View of Mount Yakedake from Taisho Pond in Kamikochi in June

View of Mount Yakedake from Taisho Pond in Kamikochi in June, a 1939 color woodblock print held at the Art Institute of Chicago in two impressions, is an early masterwork of Yamaguchi Susumu's mature [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) practice and the print on which much of his American reputation rests. By 1939 Yamaguchi was forty two and had been working as a creative print artist for nearly two decades, ever since his 1934 success at the Paris exhibition of Japanese sosaku-hanga had given him the confidence to commit fully to the woodblock medium. The print depicts Mount Yakedake reflected in the still water of Taisho Pond in the Kamikochi valley of the Northern Japan Alps, a location to which he would return repeatedly across his long career. The composition exemplifies the signature style he developed in the 1930s and that he would continue to refine through the postwar decades: thick saturated layers of water-based pigment on dampened torinoko paper, printed from grain-exposed blocks so that the wood itself contributes texture to the image. The palette favors deep blues and greens against warm earth tones, and the contours have a bold, almost cloisonné quality that contemporary critics compared to the French painter Georges Rouault. The Art Institute holds the print as one of the principal documents of the late prewar phase of the sosaku-hanga landscape tradition, and the impression preserves the saturated pigment, the exposed grain, and the disciplined registration that distinguish Yamaguchi's strongest Japan Alps landscape work.