Beguinage, Bruge, Belgium

Beguinage, Bruge, Belgium is a color woodblock print by Yoshijiro Urushibara depicting the Begijnhof in Bruges, the walled community founded for the lay religious Beguines and one of the city's most enduringly photographed corners. Urushibara returned more than once to Bruges in his European work, drawn like many of his British colleagues to its preserved medieval fabric, canal-side architecture, and quiet courtyards, and the Beguinage gave him an enclosed, garden-centred composition rather than the open water-and-bridge views he treated in his other Bruges prints. The image is constructed in the manner that became typical of his London Japanese woodblock practice: broad blocks of softened colour for the buildings, a quieter green or grey-green block for foliage, reserved paper carrying highlights along walls and gables, and a balanced placement on the sheet that has clearly been thought through as a design rather than copied directly from a sketch. Urushibara had trained as a hanga craftsman in Tokyo before settling in Britain around 1908, and his Belgian subjects belong to the same European phase that produced his Frank Brangwyn collaboration prints. Each impression was hand-pulled by him personally rather than issued through a Japanese publisher, and surviving examples are dispersed across British, American, and Canadian collections. The Honolulu Museum of Art holds this impression, and the image is documented through the ukiyo-e.org archive, which links it to the wider group of Urushibara's Bruges and Belgian views and to the European exhibition network through which they originally circulated.