Eruption of Mount Bandai (Bandaisan funka shinzu)

Held in the Kōriyama City Museum of Art, the wood-engraved Eruption of Mount Bandai (磐梯山噴火真図, Bandaisan funka shinzu, 1888) records the catastrophic phreatic eruption of Mount Bandai in Fukushima Prefecture on 15 July 1888, in which the collapse of the volcano's northern flank destroyed five villages and killed nearly five hundred people. The composition is by Yamamoto Hōsui — at the close of his Paris decade — and the wood engraving by Gōda Kiyoshi (1862-1938), the leading Meiji practitioner of the European facsimile-engraving technique that had been introduced to Japan a decade earlier by the Italian engraver Edoardo Chiossone. Hōsui's design treats the eruption in the manner of a Salon landscape catastrophe — a great vertical plume of ash rising over a darkened mountain mass with figures fleeing in the foreground — while Gōda's engraving renders the tonal range of the painting in a fine, regular hatching modelled on European illustrated newspapers such as L'Illustration. The collaboration is among the most important early-Meiji documents of Western pictorial reportage and a key witness to the transfer of European reproductive engraving to Japan, and a fine impression entered the Kōriyama City Museum of Art as part of its core collection of work relating to the 1888 disaster.