1966 Autumn Catalog

Documented via ukiyo-e.org, this image comes from the 1966 autumn catalog issued by the Red Lantern Shop (Akai Chochin), the influential Tokyo dealer that championed sosaku-hanga artists to overseas collectors throughout the postwar decades. Tadashi Nakayama (1927-2014) was a recurring presence in these seasonal catalogs, and his work appeared on covers and feature pages with enough frequency that Red Lantern mailers are themselves a useful record of his evolving style. By 1966 Nakayama had refined the visual vocabulary of his horse and girl prints into something instantly recognizable: rounded, softly contoured horses, often paired with poised young figures, set against fields of stenciled pattern, gold leaf, or quiet washes of color. The catalog plate shown here would have been printed in Japan, paired inside with prices and edition information aimed at the Red Lantern Shop's English-speaking subscribers in the United States and Europe. The Red Lantern Shop's role in the dissemination of sosaku-hanga cannot be overstated. While other galleries handled individual artists, the Akai Chochin's mail-order catalogs introduced a generation of foreign buyers to creative print as a self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed art form, and they helped build the secondary market that still values Nakayama's work today. For collectors, the 1966 autumn catalog is both a historical artifact and a snapshot of how Tadashi Nakayama's horse and girl prints were marketed at a particular moment. It documents the commercial scaffolding around his career, complementing the artworks themselves and offering useful context for anyone studying the international reception of postwar Japanese printmaking.