Trees in Moonlight

Trees in Moonlight is a nocturnal landscape color woodblock print by Yoshijiro Urushibara, a study of trees silhouetted against a moonlit sky that draws on both the Japanese tradition of tsukimi moon-viewing imagery and the European Romantic taste for moonlit landscape that flourished in the Brangwyn circle in London. Urushibara had trained as a hanga craftsman in Tokyo before being sent to Britain around the time of the 1910 Japan-British Exhibition, and he remained in London for nearly three decades. During that period the Frank Brangwyn collaboration brought him into contact with British artists working in mezzotint, lithography, and oil who were exploring exactly this kind of atmospheric subject. Urushibara's response, here as in his other nocturnes, is to lean on the strengths of the woodblock medium: a few well-judged blocks carry the tree silhouettes, a wash-like background block establishes the night sky, and the moon itself is reserved as unprinted paper or printed in a single pale tone. The result is not a literal transcription of nature but a designed image that maintains the flatness and graphic discipline of the Japanese print tradition while answering to an Edwardian and interwar London Japanese woodblock taste for poetic, moodful scenery. The print is documented in the Japanese Architecture and Art Net Users System archive through ukiyo-e.org and is part of an informal group of nocturnal landscapes that Urushibara produced alongside his better-known city views and Brangwyn collaborations.