Mountain Village with Houses Along the Shore (No. 1 from Henan Hasshō, Eight Excellent Views of Henan)
河南八勝 第一
by Sakai Bunsei
- Date:
- c. 1830s
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print
- Source:
- Harvard Art Museums
河南八勝 第一
by Sakai Bunsei
Mountain Village with Houses Along the Shore is the first sheet in Bunsei's series Henan Hasshō (河南八勝, Eight Excellent Views of Henan), published c. 1830s in Edo and known in a complete set at the Harvard Art Museums. The composition is built around a cluster of low-tiled village roofs nestled at the base of a sweeping mountain that drops to a band of blue water at the lower right; a small Shinto-style gateway or temple form is visible among the trees on the rocky slope above the village. The upper register carries a Chinese-style poem in five-character lines, two small red seal-form cartouches reading the picture's caption, and the printed series designation 河南八勝 第一 ("Henan Eight Views, no. 1") in the upper-left corner. At the right margin the artist's seal-form signature 文清/文星 (Bunsei) is impressed in red. The print exemplifies the small-format, literati-inflected color landscape that Bunsei adapted from the Bunjinga landscape painting tradition of his teacher Tani Bunchō: a heavily massed natural form opening to wide distance, restrained palette built around earth grays and a single body of saturated blue water, and an upper register of inscription that frames the picture as a printed analogue to a Chinese landscape album leaf. The Henan set is comparatively unusual in Edo print culture for taking as its subject not the canonical Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang Rivers in Hunan but the central Chinese province of Henan, a region whose historical sites figured in the Sinophile geographical imagination of late-Edo literati.
河南八勝 第六
c. 1830s
Color woodblock print
河南八勝 第七 伊瀬皎月
c. 1830s
Color woodblock print
河南八勝 第三 釣魚
c. 1830s
Color woodblock print
河南八勝 第八 石門喬松
c. 1830s
Color woodblock print
Wakasa Kugushiko
1920
Color woodblock print; oban
Woodblock print
1934
Color woodblock print; oban
n.d.
Woodblock print; ishizuri-e, section of harimaze sheet
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
Mountain Village with Houses Along the Shore (No. 1 from Henan Hasshō, Eight Excellent Views of Henan) (河南八勝 第一) was created by Sakai Bunsei (酒井文星) in c. 1830s.
Mountain Village with Houses Along the Shore (No. 1 from Henan Hasshō, Eight Excellent Views of Henan) depicts landscapes.