1965 Autumn Catalog

This image, documented through ukiyo-e.org, is a cover or featured plate from the 1965 autumn catalog of the Red Lantern Shop (Akai Chochin), the Tokyo gallery and dealer that served as one of the most important outlets for postwar Japanese creative prints. Tadashi Nakayama (1927-2014) was among the artists most closely associated with the Red Lantern Shop's promotion of sosaku-hanga abroad, and his playful horses and figural compositions appeared regularly in the gallery's seasonal mailers to American and European collectors. The 1965 autumn catalog dates from the height of Nakayama's international visibility, a period in which his horse and girl prints, with their soft palette, embossing, and gentle decorative geometry, were being shipped to subscribers in the United States, Britain, and Scandinavia. Red Lantern catalogs of this era functioned as both inventory lists and modest art objects in themselves: printed in Japan with care for typography and image reproduction, they introduced Western buyers to figures like Saito Kiyoshi, Maki Haku, Sekino Junichiro, and Nakayama alongside one another. The image referenced here, preserved in the Japanese Art Open Database, would have shown a representative Nakayama work, almost certainly drawn from his horse imagery or stylized maidens, accompanied inside the catalog by prices, edition sizes, and short descriptive notes. For collectors of Tadashi Nakayama and of sosaku-hanga history more broadly, ephemera like this 1965 Red Lantern Shop catalog cover is a valuable document of how horse and girl prints reached the international market, and it helps situate Nakayama within the commercial network that sustained creative printmaking in postwar Japan.