The Lake at Hakone

The artwork

A mountain made of blocks of colour, green, blue, ochre and red, rises steeply above the lake, and along its flank passes a tiny line of travellers. You receive it printed on handmade Amalfi paper, in a handmade frame.

• The rocks in solid colours, the blue of the lake and the distant mountains beyond the water.
• A bold, almost modern landscape that gives character to a living room or a study.
• A gift for anyone who loves mountains and Japanese art.

It is one of the Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō, the series that made Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), the best loved landscape artist of Japan, famous, published between 1833 and 1834. The Tōkaidō was the great road that linked Edo, today's Tokyo, with Kyoto, the city of the emperor, with fifty-three post stations along the way.

Hakone was the hardest stretch of the journey: a mountain pass among woods and cliffs, guarded by a checkpoint where travellers were inspected. Hiroshige does not draw the mountain as we would see it in a photograph, but builds it from angular shapes and colours set side by side, which is why today it looks almost like a modern painting. The procession crossing the pass is so small that it can hardly be seen: the simplest way to show how vast the mountain was. Our reproduction comes from the impression in the Cleveland Museum of Art, in the United States.

In a living room or a study it is a picture that gets noticed. A gift for anyone who loves the mountains.

Unique quality material

Print on handmade Amalfi paper
Sheet size: 29 x 42 cm (11.4 x 16.5 in)
With frame: 31 x 44 cm (12.2 x 17.3 in)
Material: artwork printed on very fine handmade Amalfi paper with deckled edges
Frame: dark brown with gold fillet, handmade, with glass