Horse Jump

Equestrian subjects are uncommon in twentieth-century Japanese woodblock printmaking, and Horse Jump probably depicts a competitive show-jumping scene at one of the riding clubs or military equestrian grounds active in interwar Japan. Kobe and the wider Kansai area hosted several Western-style sporting venues in this period, and Kawanishi was attentive to the modern, internationalized side of city life. Compositionally, a jump scene calls for a frozen mid-air moment — horse and rider suspended over a fence — which suits the hard-edged, flat-color handling Kawanishi developed under Fauvist influence. The subject extends the modernist orientation visible across his Kobe work, where shipping, foreign architecture, and urban leisure activities appear with the same directness applied to traditional landscape themes. As a sosaku-hanga work, the print would be self-carved and self-printed, with a limited palette of solid color blocks rather than the layered overprinting common in commercial woodblock production. It documents an aspect of Showa-era Japan that earlier print traditions had largely left aside.