1933 (Showa 8)/Color woodblock print on paper
35.9 x 51.5 cm
SUMMARY
Painted in this piece is Mount Fuji viewed from the Fujikawa river, flowing to the west of Fuji City, Shizuoka. It is likely to be from the position of the Fujikawa Service Area on the highway today. The foreground shows Fujikawa river’s gentle current with a reflection of soft light, and further back the magnificent, generous figure of Mount Fuji is depicted. The green hill stretching out in the middle ground is Mount Iwamoto, a famous spot for plum and cherry trees, at the top of which lies Iwamotoyama Park, from where the majesty of Mount Fuji is spread before one’s eyes. This piece, Fujikawa, was produced in two different printings. The other print features Mount Fuji with clouds aglow. Just as Claude Monet (1840-1926) did with Haystacks and Cathédrales de Rouen, Kawase Hasui often expressed the change of time by depicting the exact same motif and composition in different colors and printing blocks, making series with different atmosphere and light.
ARTIST
Kawase Hasui
1883-1957
Kawase Hasui was born in Tokyo with the real given name of Bunjiro, and passed away there too. He studied Western-style art at the Hakuba-Western Art Research Institute under Okada Saburosuke. In 1910 he became a student of Kaburaki Kiyokata. Inspired by Eight Views of Omi by Ito Shinsui, who was working in the same studio, Hasui started new printing work from 1914. In the same year, he published Shiobara Okane Road and two other prints through the Watanabe printing firm. In 1920 he cemented his reputation as a print artist with the collection Souvenirs of Travels, First Series. He always worked on landscape printing, such as the 1919 series Tokyo Juni Dai (“Twelve Scenes of Tokyo”) and the 1926 series Nihon Fukei Senshu (“Selection of Scenes of Japan”), pioneering new frontiers with a rich sense of travel and lyricism. In 1953 the creative process of Zojoji no Yuki (”Snow at Zojoji Temple”) was documented by the Cultural Properties Protection Committee.
List of artworks by the same artist
INFORMATION
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