Spring Landscape

Spring Landscape is a color woodblock print after a design by Yamamoto Shunkyo, dated to about 1900-1910 and held by the Honolulu Museum of Art (accession 31480). The composition shows a low-keyed mountain landscape in early spring: bare deciduous branches just beginning to leaf, a small foreground stream, and a layered middle distance of greens climbing into atmospheric haze. Like Shunkyo's painting work, the print stays within the Maruyama-Shijō landscape vocabulary that he had absorbed from his teacher Mori Kansai and from the wider Kyoto Shijō tradition descending from Maruyama Ōkyo. The print belongs to the same broad category of Kyoto reproduction-print production that brought senior nihonga painters' landscape designs into the medium of color woodblock printing during the late Meiji and Taishō periods; the Honolulu copy is among the better-preserved Shunkyo prints in any American collection and is helpful for understanding how his painted landscapes were translated into the smaller-scale, more portable, and more widely reproducible form of the woodblock print. It is also a useful reference for early twentieth-century Kyoto print production more generally, a body of work that has only recently begun to receive sustained scholarly attention.