La Gerbe d'Anthurium, Angur, Mer du sud

La Gerbe d'Anthurium, Angur, Mer du Sud (The Spray of Anthurium, Angaur, South Seas) is a Paul Jacoulet woodblock print documented on ukiyo-e.org via the Art of Japan dealer record, and it situates the French-Japanese woodblock artist firmly within the South Sea body of work for which he is most celebrated. Angaur, the southernmost island of the Palau archipelago in the western Pacific, was one of Jacoulet's regular destinations: he travelled extensively through the Japanese-administered Caroline and Mariana Islands from the late 1920s onward, returning with sketchbooks of faces, costumes, flora, and fauna that he then translated into tightly designed editions in his Tokyo studio. The anthurium, with its waxy red spathe and elongated yellow spadix, gave Jacoulet a chance to deploy the saturated palette and decorative compositional sense that distinguish his self-published shin-hanga editions from contemporary commercial shin-hanga. Master carvers and printers under exclusive contract to the artist produced impressions that combine clean fields of high-key color, embossed gauffrage on textiles or backgrounds, mica grounds, and selective metallic accents - technical refinements possible because Jacoulet financed and oversaw every plate personally. La Gerbe d'Anthurium is therefore both an ethnobotanical record of Micronesian life under Japanese mandate and a polished decorative composition in its own right, issued in a strictly limited, numbered edition under the artist's seal. It belongs to the broader Mer du Sud series that established the French-Japanese woodblock artist's international reputation.