Resurrection

Resurrection is a religious figure subject, an unusual category within Urushibara's primarily landscape and topographical output, and almost certainly produced after a composition by Sir Frank Brangwyn, who treated Christian themes throughout his career in stained glass, mural, and graphic work. The print would have required careful color separation across multiple cherrywood blocks to translate Brangwyn's pictorial design into the mokuhanga medium, with the figure of the risen Christ rendered through layered impressions on washi paper hand-burnished with a baren. Urushibara's collaboration with Brangwyn frequently took the form of woodblock interpretations of the British artist's pre-existing designs, allowing Brangwyn's compositional sensibility to be expressed through the saturated, fibrous surface and tonal subtlety unique to Japanese hand-printed prints. Such religious subjects sit alongside the more numerous landscape, mill, and bridge prints in Urushibara's catalogue and demonstrate the breadth of his output during the London period. The print represents an instance of Japanese woodblock technique applied to Western devotional imagery.