Hasegawa Konobu (Sadanobu IV)

Hasegawa Konobu (長谷川小信, 1914–1999), also recorded as Hasegawa Sadanobu IV (四代目長谷川貞信), was a twentieth-century successor designer in the Hasegawa workshop of Osaka — the multi-generation family print studio founded by Hasegawa Sadanobu I in the nineteenth century and carried on by his descendants. Working chiefly in the postwar decades, he produced color woodblock prints in the family's long-standing kamigata specialism of theatrical imagery — Bunraku puppet and kabuki subjects — alongside quietly nostalgic scenes of Japanese seasonal and festival life. His prints continued the Osaka–Kyoto tradition of the Hasegawa studio at a time when the wider Japanese woodblock industry had contracted, even as the Bunraku and kabuki stages of the Kansai region remained vital cultural institutions.

The Hasegawa line to which he belonged is among the most durable in Osaka printmaking. Hasegawa Sadanobu I (1809–1879) established the workshop and became a leading designer of kamigata-e — actor portraits and landscape subjects — in the mid-nineteenth century. His son Hasegawa Sadanobu II (1848–1940), who also worked under the name Konobu, carried the studio into the Meiji and early twentieth-century periods. Sadanobu II's son Hasegawa Sadanobu III (1881–1963) became the most prominent modern designer in the family and is particularly associated with prints of the Bunraku puppet theater: in 1926–1927 he produced the Illustrated Collection of Famous Japanese Puppets of the Osaka Bunrakuza, a set of forty-eight prints depicting the stage sets and principal puppet characters of twelve Bunraku plays, blocks for which were later reissued by the Uchida publishing house of Kyoto. Konobu's own work carries this documentary interest in the Osaka puppet and kabuki stage forward into the mid-twentieth century.

As one of the last designers to hold the Hasegawa workshop name, Konobu stands at the tail of a tradition that Sadanobu I had established in Osaka more than a century earlier. Because the active years of successive generations overlapped and family members shared the alternating names Konobu and Sadanobu, signed Hasegawa prints are frequently reassigned among the generations in dealer catalogues and online listings, and confident attribution depends on publishers' marks and on the stylistic character of each period. His prints reached Western collections largely through the postwar export trade in Japanese theatrical imagery, and they preserve a record of the Kansai puppet and kabuki repertory during decades when Bunraku endured as one of Japan's most treasured traditional performing arts.