Kawase Hasui's Snow Scenes
川瀬巴水 雪景色
Kawase Hasui (1883–1957) is shin-hanga's defining snow-scene artist. Working with publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō from 1918, Hasui produced atmospheric snow studies of temples, villages, and night scenes that constitute his most-collected genre — and the prints most closely identified with shin-hanga's international reputation.
About This Collection
Hasui's training was in Western-style watercolour and oil under Kaburagi Kiyokata, and the discipline shows in his snow scenes more than anywhere else in his work. Snow forces a printmaker to make the white of the paper functional rather than decorative — to work the negative space, to render the gradations of dusk light on snow with bokashi rather than line, and to differentiate falling snow from accumulated snow without losing the sense of weight. Hasui's solutions to these problems — the night-falling snowflakes against a deep indigo sky in 'Evening Snow at Edo River,' the violet snow-shadows in 'Snow at Zōjō-ji,' the way roof-snow weighs the eaves in 'Snow at Daichi Temple' — became the signature look of shin-hanga itself.
The collaboration with Watanabe Shōzaburō produced more than seventy snow prints across Hasui's career, with a particularly intense period in the late 1920s and early 1930s. After the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake destroyed the entire Watanabe inventory and Hasui's preparatory drawings, the publisher restarted the print programme — and the post-earthquake snow scenes are widely considered the artist's finest. Hasui was designated a Living National Treasure in 1956, with the snow-scene category cited specifically.
This collection gathers Hasui's snow works from the Hanga catalogue. Compare 'Evening Snow at Edo River,' the 'Snow at the Hie Shrine,' and the village winter scenes for the range of pictorial problems Hasui solved across thirty years of returning to the subject.
We’re still cataloguing prints for this collection. Check back soon — or browse our full artwork catalogue.
Frequently Asked Questions
Hasui's snow prints combine bokashi gradient sky effects, careful negative-space treatment of the paper white, and atmospheric night and dusk lighting that came from his Western-academic watercolour training. The snow scenes are widely considered his finest work and are the prints most closely identified with shin-hanga internationally.
Hasui produced more than seventy snow prints across his career, with peaks in the late 1920s and early 1930s and again in the post-WWII period. The Hanga catalogue gathers the snow works tagged with 'snow-scenes' in this collection.
'Evening Snow at Edo River' (1932) is among Hasui's most-reproduced and most-collected snow prints. 'Snow at Zōjō-ji Temple' (1925), 'Snow at the Hie Shrine,' and 'Snow at Daichi Temple' are also widely considered his definitive snow works.
Quality first-edition Hasui snow prints typically reach four to five figures at auction, with rare and pre-WWII strikes commanding the highest premium. Later Watanabe re-strikes (still hand-printed by the original workshop) are significantly more affordable and remain widely available.