Art Institute of Chicago

This Japanese woodblock print by Kato Kohshu is recorded in institutional collections aggregated through ukiyo-e.org under reference AN00521737, reflecting the cross-museum cataloguing that has made twentieth-century Japanese prints increasingly accessible to researchers. Kato Kohshu was an early to mid twentieth-century Japanese printmaker whose work circulated alongside the better-known figures of shin-hanga and sosaku-hanga, the two movements that defined modern Japanese woodblock printing. The shin-hanga movement, championed by publishers such as Watanabe Shozaburo, sought to revive and modernize the Edo-period collaborative model in which the artist designed the image and skilled carvers and printers executed the block-cutting and impression. The sosaku-hanga movement took the opposite path, insisting that the artist alone should design, carve, and print the work as a single expressive act. Kato Kohshu's surviving prints occupy a position within this broader twentieth-century print culture, and their preservation in institutional collections, including holdings traceable through the Art Institute of Chicago's documentation networks and the British Museum's Japanese prints department, allows ongoing comparative study. The print's careful registration, the quality of its line work, and the choice of subject reflect the technical standards that both movements demanded of their participants. Without a firm date or signed colophon attached to this impression, scholars rely on stylistic comparison, paper analysis, and the institutional provenance trail to place Kato Kohshu's output within its proper decade. The continued cataloguing of such works through projects like ukiyo-e.org, which unites disparate museum holdings under searchable reference numbers, ensures that even lesser-documented Japanese woodblock artists retain visibility in the scholarly record and remain available to collectors, curators, and researchers interested in the full breadth of modern hanga production.