Children and Fireworks (Summer)

Children and Fireworks, published by the Uchida woodblock printers of Kyoto around 1960, is one of Hasegawa Konobu IV's most engaging seasonal-genre prints. The composition depicts a group of children gathered at evening to watch summer hanabi, the elaborate fireworks displays that have been a defining feature of the Japanese seasonal calendar since the Edo period. Konobu IV uses a relatively wide oban format — approximately 16 5/16 inches wide by 10 5/8 inches high — to stage the scene at sufficient breadth to include both the watching children in patterned summer yukata and the bursting fireworks above, the latter rendered in starbursts of red, gold, and white against a deep indigo night sky. The print bears the artist's seal and signature at the lower right, and the verso carries the Uchida woodblock printers' mark identifying the firm's premises on Takeyamachi Street in Takakura, Kyoto. The Uchida house had been a continuous concern in Kyoto from the late nineteenth century, and its postwar productions for Konobu IV represent the continued vitality of the traditional Japanese woodblock medium into the 1960s. The print is documented through the Japanese Art Open Database from the Robert O. Muller research files, with the impression preserved in an original black lacquer frame and showing the saturated polychrome color register characteristic of the Uchida postwar editions.