Fuji in Spring Light — Print & Oil Painting

Blossom fills the top left quarter and hangs over the scene like a low ceiling. The branches come off a dark trunk at the far edge and spread right across the sky, loaded with white and pale yellow flowers laid on in fat separate touches, each one a distinct lump of paint.

Under that canopy the view opens: green hills, a deep blue lake catching broken white light, and the mountain rising centre right with cloud piled against its flank. The blue of the sky is unusually strong for this group and the white of the clouds has been left almost raw.

Two small figures sit on a wooden bench at the lower right, one in blue and one in dark clothes, facing the water with their backs to us. They amount to perhaps a dozen strokes, and they turn the landscape into a place someone goes rather than a view someone paints.

The grass around the bench is scattered with white flower heads that echo the blossom overhead and tie the two ends of the canvas together. Part of our Japan collection, where the autumn counterpart takes the same mountain in the opposite half of the year.