Avenue of Cryptomeria in Nikko

Avenue of Cryptomeria in Nikko is a Yuhan Ito landscape devoted to one of the most distinctive natural and cultural features of the Nikko region: the long, towering rows of sugi (Japanese cedar, Cryptomeria japonica) that line the approaches to the Toshogu shrine complex. Planted in the seventeenth century by Matsudaira Masatsuna over more than two decades, the avenues are protected national monuments and have been a favored subject of Japanese landscape art for centuries. In this design Yuhan Ito frames the road as a deep corridor flanked by the dense vertical trunks of the cedars, the perspective drawing the eye toward a luminous middle distance. The treatment is characteristic of the shin-hanga ('new prints') movement in which Yuhan Ito participated: a movement that Watanabe Shozaburo, working as both publisher and impresario, organized to bring together skilled designers, carvers, and printers to produce landscape prints that married traditional ukiyo-e craft with modern attention to light, mood, and naturalistic recession. Yuhan Ito's particular contribution within that ecosystem was a body of quiet, atmospheric landscape designs of famous places, and the Nikko cryptomeria avenue is an ideal subject for his sensibility - a scene that depends almost entirely on light filtering through a corridor of vertical green, with little incident or human activity. The print is recorded through ukiyo-e.org via the Japanese Art Open Database, and the catalogued impression carries no series title, date, or formal publisher's seal. As with most of Yuhan Ito's output, the work appears to have been issued as an independent landscape design within the broader shin-hanga market of the 1930s.