K
Korean Children at Play
- Date:
- c. 1921
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print
- Format:
- Oban
- Publisher:
- Watanabe Shozaburo
Keith's tender portrayal of Korean children at play documents a way of life that has largely vanished. Her Korean subjects carry both artistic and ethnographic value, attracting collectors of shin-hanga and Korean cultural history alike. Editions of only 30-50 copies ensure genuine rarity. Typical range: $1,500-$4,000.
Korean Children at Play, designed by Elizabeth Keith in 1921, is one of the artist's most affectionate genre prints from her substantial Korean oeuvre, produced in the years immediately after her first journey to the peninsula with her sister Elspet. The composition depicts a small group of children — dressed in the distinctive bright-colored hanbok of childhood, with the characteristic banded sleeves — absorbed in a familiar street game, framed against a simply rendered architectural background. Keith pays close attention to garment details, posture, and the absorbed concentration of the players, treating childhood with the same seriousness she brought to her adult portraits. The print belongs to the substantial body of Korean material Keith produced for the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo through the 1920s, much of it later collected in her 1946 book Old Korea, written with Elspet; the volume's sustained documentation of late-Choson and early-colonial Korean life makes Keith one of the most important Western artistic chroniclers of the country in that period. Like all her work for Watanabe, Korean Children at Play was produced under the traditional [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) (new prints) division of labor — Keith as designer, Watanabe as publisher, with the firm's professional carvers and printers translating her drawing into a hand-pulled woodblock — and the resulting print combines Western draftsmanship and observational realism with Japanese craft precision. No museum source is documented for this specific impression in the present records, but the print is widely held and reproduced in the Keith literature. For students of shin-hanga and of early-twentieth-century Western engagement with Korea, Korean Children at Play offers a small but telling example of how the Watanabe publishing program could carry images of Korean daily life into international circulation, treating childhood in a colonized country with the same respect that the program brought to its more formal portrait and landscape subjects.
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
Korean Children at Play was created by Elizabeth Keith (エリザベス・キース) in c. 1921.
Korean Children at Play was published by Watanabe Shozaburo (c. 1921).
Korean Children at Play depicts children and daily life.
