Benares (ベナレス)

Benares, the present-day Varanasi, is the historic Sanskrit-named city on the western bank of the Ganges River in Uttar Pradesh in north-central India, traditionally considered one of the holiest cities in Hinduism and the principal pilgrimage destination for ritual cremation along the river. The city is organized along a long curving stretch of approximately eighty ghats, the broad stone-stepped landings that descend to the river and serve as the sites of daily bathing, ritual ablution, and cremation, and along the temple-dense alleys behind, with the silhouette of palaces, towers, and temple shikharas rising directly above the water. The city is sacred in the Hindu tradition as the dwelling place of Shiva, with the Vishwanath temple at its center, and is also a major site of Buddhist heritage as the location of nearby Sarnath, where the historical Buddha is traditionally said to have delivered his first sermon after attaining enlightenment. The ghats include Dashashwamedh, the principal ghat for the daily evening aarti ceremony, Manikarnika and Harishchandra, the principal cremation ghats, and Assi Ghat at the southern end of the stretch. For Japanese printmaking the city is the central subject of the India sheets produced by Yoshida Hiroshi during and after his 1930-1931 travel to South Asia. Yoshida Hiroshi (1876-1950) had trained originally as a Western-style oil painter at the Fudosha private studio of Koyama Shotaro in Tokyo and at the Asai Chu studio, before turning to woodblock as his principal medium in the mid-1920s in collaboration with the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo and then independently from his own studio at his home in Sugamo. His shin-hanga landscape practice was distinguished from that of his contemporaries by the inclusion of foreign subjects observed during extensive travel through the United States, Western Europe, North Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. The 1930-1931 South and Southwest Asian trip, which included Singapore, India, Pakistan, Egypt, and the Middle East, produced a coordinated set of designs including Ghat in Benares, Evening in Benares (Yoru no Benaresu), Morning Mist in Benares, and Bishenu Temple at Benares, in which the artist treats the ghats at different hours, the temple buildings on the bluff above, and the boats and bathers on the river. These prints, issued through Yoshida's own studio over the following years from 1931 onward, are among the canonical examples of Japanese shin-hanga engagement with non-Japanese subjects, alongside his Egypt, Switzerland, Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, and Mexico designs. They function in the print history as an unusual late-shin-hanga incorporation of non-Japanese landscape into a Japanese woodblock idiom, executed by a Japanese carver and printer at the artist's studio in Tokyo from Yoshida's own observation drawings made on location. The visual character of Benares in Yoshida's prints is built on the receding line of stone ghats along the curving riverbank, the towers and roof lines of the temple and palace district behind, the boats and bathers in the foreground, and frequently the diffused light of dawn or evening that the artist exploited for atmospheric effect, often producing variant impressions of the same design under different color and light conditions to capture morning fog, midday sun, evening pink, and moonlight. The city remains today, under its present official name Varanasi, the most heavily visited Hindu pilgrimage city in India, and the ghats Yoshida depicted are still in active religious and daily use along the river, with the early morning boat tours from Dashashwamedh providing the principal contemporary access to the viewpoints from which his prints were composed.

Hanga catalogues 1 print depicting Benares (ベナレス), by 1 artist.

Hiroshi Yoshida is among the 1 artist who depicted Benares in our collection.