Golden Autumn Trees Around Mount Fuji — Print & Oil Painting

A thick trunk rises up the left edge and leaves the top of the canvas, painted in ridged browns and greys with the bark suggested purely by the direction of the strokes. It is far darker than anything else and sits far closer to the viewer, which is the oldest device in landscape painting and still the most reliable: everything behind it is instantly pushed away.

Depth is then built in clear layers. Orange maple canopy overhead, a second yellow-leaved tree beyond it, a strip of green lawn and a stone path curving in from the bottom right, then the lake, then a low village on the far shore, then wooded hills, then the mountain, then sky. Each plane is lighter than the one in front of it.

The lake carries a small green boat with two or three figures aboard, the single moving element in an otherwise settled picture. Around it the water is worked in blue and white horizontal strokes with a bright wedge of light running toward the far bank.

Red and orange shrubs are set along the bottom edge to answer the canopy above. From our Japan collection, where the thatched cottage above the same lake opens its foreground with grass instead of a trunk.