Hasegawa Sadanobu II

Hasegawa Sadanobu II (二代目長谷川貞信, 1848-1940) was the second-generation head of the Hasegawa workshop of Osaka kamigata-e and one of the longest-lived Japanese print designers of the modern era, a career that opened in the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate and closed on the eve of the Pacific War. The eldest son of the Osaka printmaker Hasegawa Sadanobu I (1809-1879), he produced kabuki actor portraits, kaika-e views of Westernizing Kobe and Osaka, Sino-Japanese War prints, newspaper supplement nishiki-e shinbun, advertising flyers (hikifuda), and a long series of bird-and-flower designs that bridged the late kamigata-e tradition and the early twentieth-century revival print market.

Born in Osaka on the eighteenth of the tenth month of Kaei 1 (October 18, 1848), the future Sadanobu II was given the personal name Tokutarō and studied first with his father in the Hasegawa workshop. He took additional training in the Shijō painting tradition under Ueda Kōchō, the same teacher who had given his father his initial pictorial grounding, and later studied under Ōsai Yoshiume (1819-1879), a pupil of the Edo print master Utagawa Kuniyoshi who had moved west and become an important figure in the Osaka school. Within this lineage he absorbed both the Kyoto naturalism of the Shijō tradition and the Utagawa school's command of figural and theatrical subjects, and he began signing prints in the late 1860s under the (gō) Konobu (小信) — the art name he would retain for the first thirty years of his career.

In 1867, the year before the Meiji Restoration, Konobu moved to the newly opened treaty port of Kobe, where he spent about three years documenting the dramatic visual transformation of the western Japanese coast under the impact of Western trade, architecture, and dress. He produced a substantial body of kaika-e ("civilization-and-enlightenment pictures") showing foreign legations, steamships, Western-style hotels, railway buildings, and the mixing of Japanese and foreign figures in the new port quarters of Kobe and Osaka. These prints — direct counterparts to the better-known Yokohama-e of Hashimoto Sadahide and Utagawa Yoshikazu — record the early Meiji urban landscape of the Kansai region in a way that survives in no other visual source. The MFA Boston print Accurate Depiction of the Foreign Legation on the Aji River in Osaka (1868) and the FAMSF print The Iron Bridge and Osaka Castle from the series Famous New Places in Osaka (Hanfu shinmeisho, 1870) belong to this body of kaika-e production.

Alongside views of the Westernizing city, Konobu continued his father's actor-portrait practice, producing yakusha-e in the chūban and ōban formats that documented the leading kamigata kabuki stars of the 1860s and 1870s, and he expanded into newspaper-supplement nishiki-e shinbun for the Osaka Yūbin hōchi shinbun (Postal News) and Osaka nichinichi shinbunshi (Osaka Daily News), where he supplied both illustrations and short written narratives. He worked with the Osaka publishers Honya Seishichi and Nagao Satarō, among others, in the surimono and commemorative print trades, producing such works as the 1877 Surimono for Commemorating the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Death of Nakamura Utaemon IV — a Shijō-style memorial print embellished with copper, silver, and embossing now in the Saint Louis Art Museum (34:1993). The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 brought him into the production of patriotic war prints (sensō-e), including the Five-Sheet Cut-Out Three-Dimensional Diorama of Japan's victory at Port Arthur (1895), a kumitate-e tableau in five separately printed sheets designed for assembly into a paper diorama, also in the SLAM collection.