Golden Morning, Venice

Golden Morning, Venice is part of Urushibara's sustained engagement with the Venetian lagoon, a subject he returned to throughout the 1920s and 1930s after travelling in Italy with Frank Brangwyn. The title indicates a low-sun view across water, almost certainly featuring gondolas, mooring poles, and the silhouettes of Santa Maria della Salute, San Giorgio Maggiore, or the Doge's Palace seen against a luminous sky. Such prints are constructed around extensive bokashi gradations on the sky and water blocks, applied wet-in-wet with a brush before each impression of the baren, so that the ochre and rose of the rising light dissolve into the pale blue of the lagoon without a visible seam. Architectural detail is held by a sparing key block, with reflections suggested by horizontal striations rather than outline. The print exemplifies the hybrid idiom Urushibara made his own: a Western veduta tradition rendered through the materials and registration discipline of Edo-period meisho-e, printed on Japanese washi for a London market.