Prints from Japan

Subcategories

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  Hasui Kawase

  From serene landscapes to bustling cityscapes, the reproduction prints of Kawase Hasui offer a window into the beauty and diversity of Japanese culture. Each print is a masterpiece in its own right, capturing the essence of Hasui's unique vision and artistic talent.

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  Koson Ohara

  He was born in 1877 in Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture as Ohara Matao. He studied painting and drawing with Suzuki Koson, whose name he later adopted.

  He began with illustrations of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-1905. It was the time when the art of traditional prints (Ukiyo-e) was no longer in vogue, replaced by photography. Many artists of those years had great success with these war prints. Koson was then a teacher at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts where an American colleague, Ernest Fenellosa (1853-1908) persuaded him to return to printmaking in the traditional style. His early flower and bird prints were published by Daikokuya (Matsuki Heikichi), Kokkeido (Akiyama Buemon), and Nishinomiya Yosaku.

  From 1912, he devoted himself to painting under the name "Shoson" and only returned to printmaking in 1926 with the publisher Watanabe Shosaburo, the initiator of the Shin Hanga movement (or pictorial revival). Most of these prints were exported to the American market.

  Koson's prints are close to watercolors and made with the greatest care, with great attention to detail, especially on the feathers.

  Ohara Koson used different seals and signatures during his career and it is very difficult to date his works precisely. Prints made after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 generally have brighter colors than his early works. Some were printed with different color variations.

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  Utagawa Hiroshige

  Utagawa Hiroshige, whose birth name is Hiroshige Ando, ​​born in 1797 in Edo and died on October 12, 1858 in Edo, is a Japanese designer, engraver and painter. It is distinguished by series of prints on Mount Fuji and Edo, evocatively drawing the landscapes and atmosphere of the city, taking up moments of daily life in the city before its transformation in the Meiji era. (1868-1912).

  A prolific author, active between 1818 and 1858, he created a body of work made up of more than 5,400 prints.

  He is with Hokusai, with whom he is often compared, one of the last very great names in ukiyo-e and, in particular, in landscape printing, which he will have taken to an unequaled peak before the decline xylography in Japan.

  His most famous series, the Hundred Views of Edo, The Sixty-nine Stations of Kiso Kaidō and especially The Fifty-three Stations of Tōkaidō, rival in notoriety Hokusai's famous series, The Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji ( which is probably the most famous Japanese print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa).

  However, Hiroshige's style is quite different from Hokusai's.

  Hiroshige makes himself the humble interpreter of nature, who, using the crude means of wood engraving, knows how to express as through "an enchanted window" the delicate transparencies of the atmosphere over the seasons, in landscapes where man is always present. The composition of his works is striking, characterized by a subtle mastery of bold colors – with a dominance of green and blue. His sense of the foreground will be taken up later by Degas, and we will find it in photography.

  Shortly after the forced reopening of Japan to exchanges with the West, it was mainly through the work of Hiroshige that around 1870 the world discovered the astonishing originality of the graphic arts in this country. Japonism will have a determining influence on the impressionist painters and then on Art Nouveau.