Pieter Irwin Brown

Pieter Irwin Brown (1903–1988) was a woodblock print artist, born in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, who settled in Japan in the 1930s and produced landscape prints in the shin-hanga tradition. Born to a Dutch father and an Irish mother — the latter connection giving him a claim to a British passport — Brown trained at the Rotterdam Academy of Visual Arts and then at the Royal Academy in Amsterdam. He worked for a time as a commercial and poster designer in London before extended travels through Europe, Africa, and Asia drew him toward Japan.

In 1934 Brown settled in Kyoto, and journeys through China, Manchuria, and Korea yielded sketches and drawings that he brought to the shin-hanga publisher Watanabe Shozaburo, who developed a number of them into woodblock prints; he also worked with the publisher Adachi Toyohisa. His prints depict Japanese and East Asian scenery — mountains, temples, gardens, and rural landscapes — rendered with an attention to atmosphere characteristic of shin-hanga. His output was modest, and his work is not widely documented in the standard references on Japanese printmaking, though examples survive through dealers specializing in the genre. He represents the broader phenomenon of Western artists drawn to Japan's woodblock printing tradition in the early twentieth century. Brown left Japan in 1940 for the United States, later took the name Peter van Oordt (his mother's maiden name), and died in 1988.