Meisho Jûnikei - Twelve Views of Famous Places

Meisho Jûnikei translates as Twelve Views of Famous Places, situating the work within the meisho-e tradition that Hokusai and Hiroshige had defined a century earlier and that shin-hanga artists consciously revived. A twelve-view structure was a standard Edo-period framework, often paired with the months or seasons, and Hasui used such groupings throughout his career to organise travels through Japan into coherent print series. Each design in a Meisho Jûnikei set typically combines a topographically recognisable site — a temple, bridge, harbour, or lake — with a specific weather or time-of-day condition, so that the series functions both as guidebook imagery and as an atlas of atmospheric effects. Production followed the standard shin-hanga division of labour between Hasui as designer, the carver who cut the multiple cherrywood blocks, and the printer who applied bokashi gradations and successive colour impressions onto washi. The series exemplifies Hasui's effort to update meisho-e for a twentieth-century audience while retaining the woodblock medium's hand-printed character.