Clearing A Building After An Earthquake (after Frank Brangwyn R.A.), Meiji period, 1908

Clearing A Building After An Earthquake (after Frank Brangwyn R.A.) is one of the foundational works of the Frank Brangwyn collaboration that defined Yoshijiro Urushibara's London career. Dated to the late Meiji period around 1908, this color woodblock print translates a composition by the Welsh painter and printmaker Frank Brangwyn into the medium Urushibara had trained in as a young craftsman in Tokyo. The image shows labourers hauling and clearing rubble from a damaged structure, a scene drawn from Brangwyn's interest in industrial and disaster subjects, here recast through the layered colour and reserved white paper of Japanese woodblock technique. The collaboration began when Urushibara was sent to London in connection with the Japan-British Exhibition and Brangwyn, already an established Royal Academician, recognised that a properly trained Japanese block cutter and printer could turn his designs into prints unlike anything being produced in British workshops. Urushibara cut the blocks, mixed the water-based pigments, and pulled each impression by hand, and through prints such as this one the partnership produced a body of work that effectively introduced London Japanese woodblock practice to a British art-world audience. The Harvard Art Museums hold this impression in their collection, and the image record is preserved on ukiyo-e.org with attribution to both Urushibara as printmaker and Brangwyn as designer. The print is significant not only as a Brangwyn design but as evidence of how Urushibara adapted ukiyo-e workshop methods, originally developed for Edo theatre and landscape prints, to render the modern industrial and architectural subjects that Brangwyn favoured.