The Capital of England, London City

The Capital of England, London City is an Osaka woodblock print by Hasegawa Sadanobu III, a twentieth-century artist who carried forward the Hasegawa family's long tradition of printmaking in the Kansai region. The composition turns its attention away from the familiar Japanese landscapes that dominated the family workshop's nineteenth-century output and instead frames a foreign capital, a subject that became increasingly common as Japanese printmakers responded to a curious public eager for images of the wider world. London is rendered here through a distinctly Japanese sensibility, with the city's architecture, river, and atmosphere translated into the flat colour fields, clean outlines, and balanced massing that characterise the Hasegawa house style. The print belongs to the broader currents of [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga), the early-to-mid-twentieth-century movement that revived traditional woodblock craftsmanship while embracing modern subjects, foreign views, and contemporary atmospheric effects. As an Osaka woodblock artist working in the lineage established by Hasegawa Sadanobu I and II, Sadanobu III maintained the regional Kamigata printmaking identity that distinguished Osaka production from Tokyo's Edo-rooted [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) workshops. Osaka prints were historically associated with kabuki portraiture and a particular taste for refined surface and restrained palette, and elements of that sensibility carry into this view of London, where the city is treated less as documentary record than as evocative scene. The image survives in collections such as ukiyo-e.org, where it is catalogued among Sadanobu III's documented works. The print stands as a reminder that the shin-hanga generation looked outward as well as inward, recording foreign capitals with the same attentive craft applied to Japanese landscapes, and that the Hasegawa workshop participated in the twentieth-century reinvention of Osaka woodblock practice. Source: ukiyo-e.org.