Wise Women and Foolish Women
- Medium:
- Woodblock print
- Edition:
- Self-printed
- Source:
- Japanese Art Open Database
Typical Price
$500–$5,000. Common Biblical prints: $500–$1,500. Key value factors: Watanabe's warm, folk-art Biblical prints have a devoted collector base. Larger formats and earlier works command more.
Description
The parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (rendered here as "Wise Women and Foolish Women") — in which ten virgins await the bridegroom, five with oil in their lamps and five without, the foolish five shut out when they arrive to buy oil too late — is one of Jesus' most pointed parables about readiness and the irreversibility of missed opportunities. Watanabe's katazome rendering of this parable's moral drama depicts the two groups — the prepared and the unprepared — in the bold, contrasting forms of his stencil technique, the lamps present or absent as the single visual key to the parable's meaning.
More Prints by Sadao Watanabe
Featured in Collections
Curated cross-cuts that include this print.
Frequently Asked Questions
Wise Women and Foolish Women was created by Sadao Watanabe (渡辺禎雄).
Wise Women and Foolish Women uses Stencil Print, on woodblock print.