Bruges No.2

Bruges No.2 is a color woodblock print by Yoshijiro Urushibara, the Japanese printmaker whose decades-long London residency made him one of the most important cultural intermediaries between Edo-period woodblock craft and early twentieth-century European art. Urushibara had arrived in Britain in 1908 as part of the Japan-British Exhibition delegation and remained there for nearly thirty years, and his subjects steadily expanded from traditional Japanese motifs to the cities, rivers, and architecture of Northern Europe. This view of Bruges belongs to that European phase of his output, when his Frank Brangwyn collaboration was at its most intense and when his work circulated through London galleries to collectors who prized the warm tonality and hand-cut block work of the London Japanese woodblock idiom he was helping to define. The composition treats the Flemish canal city in a manner that is distinct from a European etcher's line and equally distinct from an ukiyo-e cityscape: the print is built up from broad areas of soft, transparent colour laid one over another, with quiet reserved whites for water and sky and a careful weight of darker pigment for stonework and rooftops. The image documents Urushibara's interest in the brick-and-water architecture of Bruges, a city he depicted more than once, and shows how his training in the Japanese hanga workshop tradition let him render Northern light through layered woodblock impressions rather than ink wash. The print is held in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco collection and is documented through the ukiyo-e.org image archive, which preserves its connection to Urushibara's broader European series and to the Brangwyn circle that helped bring Japanese woodblock methods into mainstream British exhibition culture.