Mount Fuji Beyond a Lake with Flying Birds — Print & Oil Painting

Two trees do the framing. One leans in from the left on a rust-coloured trunk, the other rises on the right and arches over the top of the canvas, and between them a clean opening has been left onto the water and the mountain. The effect is closer to a stage than a window: you are standing in the wings.

Inside that opening everything is still. The lake lies flat and carries a long gold streak of reflected light down its centre, the far shore is a dense green thicket, and the cone rises behind it in white and dark slate under a heavily worked snow cap. There is no wind in the trees and no ripple on the water.

The only movement anywhere is three white birds crossing low over the lake on the right, painted in six or seven strokes and placed at the point the eye reaches after travelling up the reflection. They are small, and without them the picture would be inert.

The foreground is the busiest passage: coarse grass, boulders and orange blossom on the left, all in thick vertical dabs. From our Japan collection, where the version with a wooden boat drawn across the foreground takes the opposite approach and puts a made object at the front.