woman with pekingese

Woman with Pekingese is a [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) woodblock print designed by Fritz Capelari and published in Tokyo by Watanabe Shozaburo. The composition shows a woman seated with a small Pekingese dog, a fashionable companion animal whose presence quietly signals modernity and cosmopolitan taste in early twentieth century Japan. Capelari, an Austrian painter working briefly in Japan in the mid 1910s, was one of the very first foreign artists Watanabe Shozaburo invited to design prints, and his contributions are considered foundational to the shin-hanga ("new prints") movement. Watanabe was at that moment building a workshop based revival of the Japanese woodblock print, and choosing a European draftsman as an early collaborator was a deliberate test of how far the traditional carver and printer system could be pushed around a modern, Western informed aesthetic. In Woman with Pekingese Capelari treats the figure with the soft modeling and atmospheric color of a Continental painter rather than with the crisp linework of earlier [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga). The dog adds an almost domestic, observational quality, situating the woman in a private moment rather than in the idealized pose of a classical beauty. The Watanabe workshop has carried this painterly approach into the printed sheet through broad inked areas, gentle [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradients and restrained outline carving. Together with Capelari's other 1915 Watanabe designs, this print helps mark the moment when shin-hanga was first being defined as a deliberate fusion of foreign draftsmanship and Japanese print craft. The impression is documented through Scholten Japanese Art and catalogued on ukiyo-e.org, which preserves a digital record of the design for collectors and researchers.