Garden (Niwa)

Garden (Niwa), a 1959 color woodblock print held at the Harvard Art Museums (object 173534), is among the earliest sheets in Shima Tamami's brief [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) career, produced the year of her graduation from the Joshibi College of Art and Design in Tokyo. It belongs to the bequest of C. Adrian Rubel, which forms one of the principal concentrations of her work in American collections. The print typifies the formal vocabulary Shima brought to her postwar woodblock practice from the outset: bold exaggerated woodgrain used as both texture and structural pattern, large flat areas of restrained color, and a careful balance between positive image and the reserved paper of the ground. The garden subject is treated not as a topographical record but as a decorative arrangement of trees, stones, and ground in which the natural figure of the plank carries much of the descriptive work. Shima had joined the Joryu Hanga Kyokai (Women's Print Association) the year of the print and committed herself to the jiga-jikoku-jizuri (self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed) principle that defined sosaku-hanga, personally designing, carving, and printing each sheet. The Harvard impression preserves the careful registration and the clean inking that distinguish her best Showa woodblock prints, and the work demonstrates the modernist handling of grain and color that quickly placed her among the most distinctive women printmakers of her generation.