Yabase

Yabase, a 1917 woodblock print by Ito Shinsui held in the Art Institute of Chicago, belongs to his early Eight Views of Omi (Omi hakkei) project and addresses the classical conceit traditionally associated with the Yabase site: boats returning to harbor across Lake Biwa. The Yabase landing on the lake's eastern shore had been a staple of the Omi tradition for centuries, depicted by Hiroshige and other Edo masters before Shinsui took it up for the shin-hanga revival. In Shinsui's hands the subject loses any genre-scene busyness and becomes a meditation on water, sky, and the small graphic punctuation of a sail or two. The print's expressive work is carried by bokashi gradation across broad fields and by the carefully judged horizon, both signatures of the printing workshop that publisher Watanabe Shozaburo had built around Ito Shinsui and his peers. The 1917 dating places the design at the same moment Shinsui was beginning his major bijin-ga series of modern Japanese beauties, and the two threads of his output, landscape and figural, share the same restrained tonal palette and unhurried compositional pacing. The Art Institute of Chicago lists this work among its Japanese print holdings and presents it as a record of how a teenage artist was simultaneously revitalizing a classical landscape theme and laying the groundwork for the shin-hanga bijin-ga that would make Ito Shinsui internationally collected. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, artwork no. 34673.