(Title unknown) Portrait of a Girl

Created in 1916 in the oban format, this woodblock print presents a young girl in portrait, her face and posture captured with the directness of a Western trained eye working in a Japanese medium. Fritz Capelari was an Austrian artist who traveled to Japan and became one of the first Western artists to produce shin-hanga prints under the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo. His European training in observational drawing gave his portraits a naturalistic quality distinct from the idealized faces typical of Japanese bijin-ga. The girl's features are rendered with individual specificity rather than the standardized beauty of traditional prints. Capelari's cross-cultural position, a Viennese artist working with Japanese carvers and printers, produced a hybrid visual language that belongs fully to neither tradition. The oban format provided ample space for this close study of a young face.