Eight Views of Lake Biwa
About This Series
Eight Views of Lake Biwa (Omi hakkei), the cycle that Ito Shinsui designed for the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo across the years around 1917 and 1918, transposes one of the most venerable inherited landscape formats of East Asian art into the shin-hanga idiom that Watanabe and his collaborating artists were establishing in the late 1910s. The Omi hakkei tradition, descended from the Chinese Xiao-Xiang model and naturalized to Japan through medieval poetry and painting around the southern shore of Lake Biwa, had been treated by every major ukiyo-e landscape designer from Hiroshige forward, and the canonical roster of subjects, including the autumn moon at Ishiyama, the evening snow at Hira, the returning sails at Yabase, the evening glow at Seta, the evening bell at Mii Temple, the descending geese at Katada, the night rain at Karasaki, and the clear breeze at Awazu, was so heavily glossed by the time Shinsui took it up that his task was less the discovery of new sites than the translation of an inherited literary cycle into a new pictorial register. Working at not yet twenty under Watanabe's direction, Shinsui pared each design back to broad fields of bokashi-graded sky and water, low horizons, and the small graphic punctuation of pine, sail, or pavilion that fixed the canonical subject without crowding it, producing a set whose mood-driven restraint distinguished it sharply from the more anecdotally populated Edo treatments of the same theme. The cycle belongs to the earliest phase of Shinsui's collaboration with Watanabe and runs in parallel with his nascent bijin-ga work of the same years, the two strands sharing a common tonal restraint and unhurried compositional pacing that became the shin-hanga signature. As one of the founding shin-hanga landscape projects, the Omi hakkei stands alongside the contemporary work of Kawase Hasui and Yoshida Hiroshi as evidence that the publisher's program addressed both bijin-ga and fukei-e from the outset, and modern scholarship reads the set as the laboratory in which Shinsui developed the atmospheric landscape vocabulary that would feed back into the staged backgrounds of his mature figure prints. Representative impressions are held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Honolulu Museum of Art, where complete or near-complete sets allow direct comparison across the eight prescribed scenes.
Prints in This Series (4)
Frequently Asked Questions
Eight Views of Lake Biwa (Omi hakkei), the cycle that Ito Shinsui designed for the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo across the years around 1917 and 1918, transposes one of the most venerable inherited landscape formats of East Asian art into the shin-hanga idiom that Watanabe and his collaborating artists were establishing in the late 1910s. The Omi hakkei tradition, descended from the Chinese Xiao-Xiang model and naturalized to Japan through medieval poetry and painting around the southern shore of Lake Biwa, had been treated by every major ukiyo-e landscape designer from Hiroshige forward, and the canonical roster of subjects, including the autumn moon at Ishiyama, the evening snow at Hira, the returning sails at Yabase, the evening glow at Seta, the evening bell at Mii Temple, the descending geese at Katada, the night rain at Karasaki, and the clear breeze at Awazu, was so heavily glossed by the time Shinsui took it up that his task was less the discovery of new sites than the translation of an inherited literary cycle into a new pictorial register. Working at not yet twenty under Watanabe's direction, Shinsui pared each design back to broad fields of bokashi-graded sky and water, low horizons, and the small graphic punctuation of pine, sail, or pavilion that fixed the canonical subject without crowding it, producing a set whose mood-driven restraint distinguished it sharply from the more anecdotally populated Edo treatments of the same theme. The cycle belongs to the earliest phase of Shinsui's collaboration with Watanabe and runs in parallel with his nascent bijin-ga work of the same years, the two strands sharing a common tonal restraint and unhurried compositional pacing that became the shin-hanga signature. As one of the founding shin-hanga landscape projects, the Omi hakkei stands alongside the contemporary work of Kawase Hasui and Yoshida Hiroshi as evidence that the publisher's program addressed both bijin-ga and fukei-e from the outset, and modern scholarship reads the set as the laboratory in which Shinsui developed the atmospheric landscape vocabulary that would feed back into the staged backgrounds of his mature figure prints. Representative impressions are held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Honolulu Museum of Art, where complete or near-complete sets allow direct comparison across the eight prescribed scenes.
The Eight Views of Lake Biwa series contains 4 prints, created by Ito Shinsui.
The Eight Views of Lake Biwa series was created by Ito Shinsui (伊東深水).
We currently have 4 of 4 known prints from the Eight Views of Lake Biwa series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
Want to rate prints from Eight Views of Lake Biwa?
Sign up to start rating