Snow in Kashiwabara | Hiroshi Yoshida | Japanese Art Print

The snow has fallen all night. Beside an old farmhouse, three villagers pull a sled through the drifts, while a dark stream still runs between the white banks.

Kashiwabara is a mountain village in Nagano, one of the snowiest regions of Japan, and the birthplace of the great haiku poet Kobayashi Issa. Returning there in his old age, Issa wrote: "So this is it, my final home: five feet of snow." A century later, in 1927, Hiroshi Yoshida walked through the same white silence and turned it into this print.

A master of shin-hanga

Hiroshi Yoshida (1876–1950) was one of the great names of shin-hanga, the 20th-century revival of the Japanese woodblock print. A painter trained in the Western tradition, he brought its light and atmosphere into the woodblock technique and supervised every print himself. The margin still bears the word jizuri, "self-printed", and his English title and pencil signature, added for his collectors abroad.

Look closer

• The villagers: one in red, two in blue, hauling a sled loaded with bundles.
• The farmhouse, its timber frame glowing warm brown under a heavy roof of snow.
• The dark stream at left, the only thing that doesn't freeze, with its rust-colored stones.
• The soft winter sky, a pale peach light over the snowy hills.

In your home

Its palette of snow white, warm wood and soft peach brings a quiet, cozy calm to a living room, bedroom or hallway, all year round and especially in winter. It looks lovely in a natural oak or walnut frame.

Your print

• Museum-quality fine-art printing on heavy matte paper
• Original proportions, including the paper margin, inscriptions and pencil signature
• Several sizes available · frame not included

Discover more of his mountains, lakes and snowy villages in our Hiroshi Yoshida collection, and all our Japanese art prints.