Harvesting

Harvesting depicts a rural Japanese scene of grain or rice being gathered, a subject Shiro Kasamatsu returned to repeatedly within his shin-hanga practice. Where many shin-hanga artists emphasised urban modernity or famous landscapes, Kasamatsu often turned to working agricultural villages, treating harvest, planting, and seasonal labour as legitimate subjects for the modernised woodblock medium. The composition typically organises the field, the workers, and the surrounding hills or sky into broad horizontal bands, with bokashi gradations carrying the time of day and a restrained palette of ochres, greens, and slate blues conveying the season. The print continues a long tradition in Japanese visual art of farming scenes, from medieval painted scrolls through Edo-period ukiyo-e meisho-e, but reframes it in twentieth-century shin-hanga terms: a slower, atmosphere-driven view rather than a narrative tableau. Production followed the standard shin-hanga workflow associated with the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo, in which the artist's design was cut into a keyblock and accompanying colour blocks by specialist carvers and printed in a small workshop edition by trained printers. Watanabe's house exported many such prints to overseas collectors, and rural-labour subjects of this kind were among the images that defined Western perceptions of mid-twentieth-century Japanese life. The print is documented through the ukiyo-e.org aggregator, which catalogues impressions held in museum and dealer collections.