Details

In Foggy Morning, Van Ness Ave, S.F., Chiura Obata renders the hushed grace of an urban morning veiled in Pacific fog. At once exacting and ephemeral, this quietly profound work captures a moment when the modern city recedes into suggestion—its geometry softened by vapor, its lines gently overtaken by atmosphere. The entire background has been printed with a delicate layer of silver mica, imparting a subtle shimmer that changes with the light, and heightens the print’s immersive sense of moisture-laden air and early morning stillness.

A single horse and rider traverse the vacant avenue, suspended in a space that seems to hover between dream and waking. To the right, an unadorned telegraph pole draws the eye vertically into the pale sky, echoing the discipline of classical Chinese landscape scrolls, while the horizontal sweep of the street foregrounds the vast emptiness that gives this print its quiet resonance. Buildings fade into fog at left, while a barely sketched car at right anchors the work to its contemporary setting. Yet the dominant mood is timeless—a balance between natural transience and man-made form, rendered with extreme sensitivity.

Connoisseur's Note

Printed in Japan by the Takamizawa Company under Obata’s direct supervision, Foggy Morning is part of the landmark World Landscape Series – America, executed during the artist’s most ambitious and experimental period. The use of silver mica throughout the background is not merely decorative but intrinsic to the work’s atmospheric success, capturing the way morning fog refracts and absorbs light in San Francisco’s coastal environment. This shimmering veil softens architectural details, heightens tonal subtleties, and animates the paper surface with an almost otherworldly luminescence.

Obata’s command of Japanese materials and aesthetics—combined with his immersion in Western modernism—allowed him to render scenes of the American West and its cities with an eye uniquely his own. While the Sierra Nevada compositions from this series are widely celebrated, prints like Foggy Morning offer a quieter, but equally refined vision: a celebration of pause, light, and the everyday transformed by perception. This print is a rare example of Japanese woodblock printing being used to evoke a distinctly American urban setting—yet doing so with a poise and subtlety that remains deeply rooted in Japanese artistic sensibility.