Description

A slender white birch leans diagonally across the image, its pale trunk marked with rust-red and dark spots, forming the most striking accent of this high-mountain scene. To its right stands a group of tall conifers, their branches rendered in short, horizontal strokes, while at lower left roughly shaped rock blocks lie along a watercourse.

The upper part of the image is dominated by a massive, bare mountain flank, its ridges and gullies suggested in loose brushstrokes and fading into haze toward the bottom. Halfway up the slope, a house with a reddish-brown roof nestles against the mountainside, scarcely larger than a fingernail, making the mountain's scale comprehensible for the first time. The short, horizontally placed branch strokes of the conifers recur above in the rhythm of the rock gullies, binding foreground and background together.

The color mood is unusual for a hanging scroll: subdued olive green and warm ocher yellow define the slopes, while cool gray carries the rock face. Signed lower right, executed as a silkscreen print on silk, this piece appears more modern than most classical landscape motifs.