Hasegawa Konobu (Sadanobu IV)

Hasegawa Konobu (長谷川小信, 1914–1999), also recorded by specialists as Hasegawa Sadanobu IV (四代目長谷川貞信), is the postwar successor designer of the Hasegawa workshop of Osaka — the four-generation family print studio founded by Hasegawa Sadanobu I in the early nineteenth century and continued by Sadanobu II (Konobu I), Sadanobu III (Konobu III), and the present figure. He worked principally in the 1950s and early 1960s, producing color woodblock prints of Bunraku puppet characters, kabuki actor subjects, scenes of Japanese seasonal life, and historical narratives, in collaboration with the Kyoto printing house of Uchida and the publisher Maria Shobō. Within the Hasegawa lineage he is the last designer of consequence to inherit the workshop name and the studio's specialism in kamigata theatrical imagery, working in a period when the centuries-old kabuki and bunraku stages of Osaka and Kyoto remained vital cultural institutions even as the broader Japanese woodblock industry contracted.

Konobu IV's most consequential body of work is the Bunraku Doll Print Collection (Bunraku ningyō hanga-shū, 文楽人形版画集), a set of ten oban-format prints depicting the carved and costumed puppet heads of the great Osaka Bunrakuza repertory. Published by Maria Shobō in or around 1955, with explanatory folders and a canvas album folio, the series treats subjects drawn directly from the canonical jōruri plays: Yaegaki-hime from Honchō nijūshikō (The Twenty-Four Examples of Filial Piety), Atsumori from Ichinotani futaba gunki, Tamaori-hime from Settsu Yoshioka or related repertory, Sadakurō from Kanadehon Chūshingura, Masaoka from Meiboku Sendai hagi, and several others. The composition strategy across the series is consistent and distinctive: each puppet is isolated against a flat decorative ground, the costume rendered in full polychrome with attentive treatment of textile pattern, the head modeled with the carved planes of the original kashira (puppet head), and the supporting hands of the puppeteer omitted to present the figure as if independently animate. The set continues a documentary tradition that Sadanobu III had inaugurated in 1926–27 with his forty-eight-sheet Illustrated Collection of Famous Japanese Puppets of the Osaka Bunrakuza, and Konobu IV's prints function as a more compact postwar companion to that earlier project. Separately from the Maria Shobō series, Konobu IV produced Bunraku puppet designs for Uchida of Kyoto in the same period — sheets such as Bunraku Hideki, Bunraku Bujin, and Masaoka — that circulated as individual prints in Japan and through export to American collectors.

The second main strand of his output is a group of seasonal genre prints — small celebratory scenes of Japanese childhood and festival life — produced for the Uchida woodblock printers of Kyoto (the Uchida house, located on Takeyamachi Street in Takakura, was a continuous concern from the late nineteenth century into the postwar period and printed for a range of designers). Konobu IV's contributions to the Uchida catalogue include The Hanetsuki (Spring), a print of three young girls in patterned kimono playing the New Year battledore-and-shuttlecock game; Children and Fireworks (Summer), a scene of children watching summer hanabi; The Festival (Fall), a chrysanthemum-festival or autumn-matsuri composition; The Fireworks (Summer), a related summer hanabi scene; and Snowman, a winter print of children building a yuki-darumai. These works share a quietly nostalgic register, depicting the Japanese seasonal calendar as remembered through the small rituals of childhood rather than the famous scenic landscapes of the earlier ukiyo-e tradition. They were printed in the chuban or oban format, in palettes that emphasize bright primary color against patterned grounds, and they were marketed to a domestic audience that valued the modern continuation of the traditional Japanese print medium.