Le Jardin Anglais (the English garden)

Le Jardin Anglais (The English Garden) is a print associated with Kobayakawa Kiyoshi and dated 1924 in the working brief. Kobayakawa Kiyoshi (1899-1948) was a Kyushu-born nihonga painter and printmaker who studied under Kaburagi Kiyokata and emerged in the 1920s and early 1930s as one of the most stylistically modern bijin-ga artists of the shin-hanga, or new print, movement, producing prints whose flapper-era subjects, bobbed hairstyles, and engagement with Western fashion distinguished his work from the more conservative bijin-ga of Watanabe-published contemporaries. The French title Le Jardin Anglais, the English garden, names a Western-style garden, the kind that became fashionable on temple, villa, and hotel grounds in Japanese cities during the Taisho and early Showa decades and that figured in the imagination of modern Japanese painters as an emblem of cosmopolitan, Westernizing taste. A print under this title is likely to organize its composition around a stylish young woman set within a Western garden setting, drawing the artist's modern bijin-ga sensibility into close contact with the Western-influenced landscape design that defined urban modernity in interwar Japan. The use of a French title rather than a Japanese one further underscores the cosmopolitan ambition of Kobayakawa's modern subjects, in which references to French fashion, jazz, and Western leisure culture frequently appear. The impression discussed here is documented through the Artsy listing on the secondary market (https://www.artsy.net/artwork/kiyoshi-kobayakawa-le-jardin-anglais-the-english-garden), which preserves a record of the design under Kobayakawa Kiyoshi's name. The 1924 date is reproduced as supplied in the working brief and would situate the print in the artist's early career, prior to his celebrated late-1920s and early-1930s modern bijin-ga series.