Landscape to City: 20th Century Japanese Prints Part II
Landscape to City: 20th Century Japanese Prints Part II
Kawase Hasui (1883-1957) | Small Boat in a Spring Shower, The Mitsubishi Villa in Fukagawa (Mitsubishi Fukagawa bettei no zu, shunu no kobune) | Taisho period, early 20th century
Lot Closed
May 10, 02:07 PM GMT
Estimate
6,000 - 8,000 GBP
Lot Details
Description
Kawase Hasui (1883-1957)
Small Boat in a Spring Shower, The Mitsubishi Villa in Fukagawa (Mitsubishi Fukagawa bettei no zu, shunu no kobune)
Taisho period, early 20th century
woodblock print, signed Hasui, and with artist's pre-earthquake square seal Hasui, dated Taisho kyu (1920)
20.5 x 38.7 cm., 8 x 15¼ in.
A lone oarsman garbed in straw drifts through the lake at the Mitsubishi Villa in Fukugawa. Overhead, the silhouette of what may be a cuckoo flies past and a brood of pines appear cloudlike in the distance.
In 1920, the Iwasaki family commissioned a series of eight prints by Hasui depicting their villa in eastern Tokyo. Founders of the Mitsubishi Group, the industrialist family approached Hasui’s teacher Kaburagi Kiyokata (1878-1973), and then Hasui through his publisher Watanabe Shozaburo (1885-1962), to design these woodblock prints for their clients.
There are two variants of this design: a smaller with large margins as in the present lot, and a larger with smaller margins.
For a similar impression of the same print in the collection of the Edo Tokyo Museum, collection ID 94203261, go to: