The Golden Temple Amritsar

Charles William Bartlett (1860–1940) was a British watercolorist and printmaker who collaborated with the Watanabe Shôzaburô workshop in Tokyo to produce woodblock prints depicting Asian scenes beyond Japan. Bartlett's prints adapted Western compositional traditions and naturalistic light rendering to the woodblock medium, resulting in hybrid works that occupy an unusual position within shin-hanga production. This print depicts the Harmandir Sahib—the Golden Temple—in Amritsar, Punjab, the holiest shrine in Sikhism, its gold-clad structure surrounded by the sacred pool of the Amrit Sarovar. The temple's gilded upper stories and white marble lower structure, reflected in the pool's surface, would have required the workshop's printers to achieve luminous gold effects through careful pigment layering. Bartlett traveled extensively in India and Asia, and his Watanabe-published prints represent a distinctive instance of shin-hanga techniques applied to the documentation of non-Japanese sacred architecture and pilgrimage sites.