Setting Sun on Sacramento Valley, California, U.S.A

The woodblock print Setting Sun on Sacramento Valley is a rare surviving impression from the World Landscape Series, a folio of thirty-five prints published by Takamizawa Printing Company in Tokyo. The print faithfully reproduces the scene captured in a monumental 1922 silk-ground painting now in the Saint Louis Art Museum collection. In works like this one, the artist made California scenery his own, using a high vantage point and flattened pictorial space to emphasize the vast open vistas of the great valley. A view to the west over the Sacramento River delta ends with distant peaks; above the mountains, dramatic, flame-like clouds in orange, gold, and purple twist into the air.