Maekawa Senpan

Maekawa Senpan (前川千帆, 1888-1960), born Maekawa Sennosuke (前川千之助) in Kyoto on 11 October 1888, was one of the founding figures of the twentieth-century sōsaku-hanga (creative print) movement and, alongside Onchi Kōshirō, Hiratsuka Un'ichi, and Yamamoto Kanae, one of the artists most responsible for establishing the principle that a Japanese woodblock print could be wholly the work of a single artist who designed, carved, and printed it himself. He published under the art-name 'Senpan' (千帆, literally 'a thousand sails') from early in his career; many Western catalogues nevertheless retain 'Sennosuke' as the registered birth name, and the British Museum and a number of mid-century dealer records cross-list him under both forms.

Maekawa's training was unusual for an artist who would become identified with avant-garde printmaking. He studied Western-style oil painting at the Kansai Bijutsuin (Kansai Fine Arts Academy) in Kyoto under Asai Chū (1856-1907), the pioneering yōga painter who had returned from study in Paris and brought a French academic-naturalist sensibility to the Kyoto art world. Asai's emphasis on drawing from observation, on plein-air sketching, and on a humane, faintly Barbizon-inflected view of rural and working-class subjects left a permanent mark on Maekawa's sensibility: throughout his career, even at his most graphically simplified, his prints retain a draughtsman's interest in the working body, the gesture of labour, and the texture of vernacular Japanese life.

After Asai's death in 1907, Maekawa moved to Tokyo, where like many of his Kyoto-trained contemporaries he supported himself as a commercial illustrator and cartoonist. He became a regular contributor of manga (cartoons), satirical drawings, and editorial illustrations to the leading humour magazines and newspapers of the Taishō period, including Tokyo Puck and the daily press. This long apprenticeship as a draftsman for reproduction gave him a deep familiarity with the relief-printing block, with the economy of line required by mass-circulation graphics, and with the rhythms of caricature — all of which fed back into his fine-art printmaking when he turned to it seriously in the 1910s.

The turn came through his contact with Yamamoto Kanae (1882-1946), the artist whose 1904 print Fisherman is conventionally identified as the first sōsaku-hanga work. Maekawa was an early and committed member of the Nihon Sōsaku-Hanga Kyōkai (Japan Creative Print Association), the body founded in 1918 by Yamamoto, Onchi Kōshirō, Oda Kazuma, and others to promote the jiga-jikoku-jizuri ('self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed') principle. He exhibited regularly in the Association's annual shows from its first exhibition forward, and when the broader Nihon Hanga Kyōkai (Japan Print Association) was established in 1931 to unite the various creative-print factions, Maekawa was a founding member of that organisation as well. By the 1930s he was firmly established within what came to be called the 'four giants' (or 'four pillars') of sōsaku-hanga alongside Onchi, Hiratsuka, and Maeda Masao.