Egret in Rain

Egret in Rain, dated 1928, is one of the most reproduced of Ohara Koson's shin-hanga kacho-e (bird-and-flower prints) from his mature Shoson period. The image places a white egret in the center of the sheet, its long legs braced against a strong slanting downpour rendered as fine engraved diagonal lines crossing the entire field. Koson, by this date working closely with the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo as part of the shin-hanga movement, was building on a long lineage of rain-weather bird subjects in Japanese painting and earlier ukiyo-e, but he stripped the convention down to its essentials. The print is held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Technically, Egret in Rain is a small tour de force of block printing: the rain lines required exact registration with the bird's silhouette, and the egret's plumage is built up through unprinted paper plus a series of light grey impressions to suggest volume without contour. The pale grey-green ground, blocked in evenly except for the embedded rain pattern, throws the white bird into clear relief. Koson's signature Shoson and one of the round Watanabe seals typically appear at the lower edge. As an example of late-period Ohara Koson kacho-e, the work distills what made the Shoson prints prized by Western collectors in the interwar years: a single observed animal, an economical compositional grammar, and printing that quietly displays the strengths of the shin-hanga workshop without showing off.