Narazaki Eisho

Narazaki Eishō (楢崎栄昌, 1864-1936) was a Japanese printmaker of the late Meiji through early Shōwa periods who is remembered chiefly for a small body of designs made within the shin-hanga ("new print") movement. He trained in woodblock printmaking under the painter Kobayashi Eitaku (1843-1890), and he worked at Japan's government Printing Bureau in Tokyo, where he took up Western copperplate engraving in the tradition of the Italian engraver Edoardo Chiossone (1833-1898). He used several art names during his career, working under Furo and Fuyō before becoming best known as Eishō, and he appears to have begun designing woodblock prints for the export market around 1916.

In the early 1930s Narazaki collaborated with the celebrated Tokyo publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō on a small group of shin-hanga prints. The best known of these is Inside Asakusa Kannon Temple (1932), a view of the great temple's lantern-hung interior; he also depicted landmarks of modern Tokyo such as the new Imperial Diet Building and the Meiji Shrine. Beyond these architectural subjects he worked in the bird-and-flower tradition, as in his kingfisher perched among snow-laden reeds of about 1920, and treated other nature studies as well.

His prints favor atmospheric effect over topographic precision, with soft bokashi gradations across skies and water and a restrained palette of muted blues, grays, and earth tones warmed by occasional accents of lantern light. Because his output was modest and his shin-hanga collaboration with Watanabe brief, surviving examples are comparatively scarce, and the full scope of his work has yet to be comprehensively catalogued in Western scholarship. He should not be confused with Narazaki Muneshige, the twentieth-century art historian and scholar of ukiyo-e and shin-hanga.