Snowman (Winter)

Snowman (Yuki-darumai) is the winter print in Hasegawa Konobu IV's set of seasonal genre prints issued by the Uchida printers of Kyoto in the 1950s, and like its sibling sheets it depicts the Japanese year through the small ritual celebrations of childhood. The composition shows children at play with a snowman they have constructed — the form rendered in soft white against a quiet winter ground — and the children themselves are bundled in warm patterned kimono and quilted vests for the cold. Konobu IV's color register stays restrained in the winter palette of pale blue, soft white, and the warm reds of the children's clothing, and the keyblock linework is firmer than the artist's predecessor Sadanobu III would have used, marking the print stylistically as a postwar Uchida production. The print is documented through the Japanese Art Open Database from the Robert O. Muller research files and forms part of a coherent four-print seasonal cycle that includes The Hanetsuki (Spring), The Fireworks or The Festival (Summer / Fall), and the present winter sheet. The Uchida house's continuation of the traditional Japanese woodblock medium into the postwar period provided the institutional infrastructure that allowed Konobu IV's seasonal genre work to remain in production well into the 1960s.