Eight Views of Ohmi
About This Series
Eight Views of Ohmi is an alternative romanization under which sheets from Ito Shinsui's Eight Views of Omi (Omi hakkei) cycle circulate in some Western cataloguing systems, the older Ohmi spelling preserving the long vowel that modern romanization rendered as Omi. The series, published by Watanabe Shozaburo across the years around 1917 and 1918 from Shinsui's designs, treats the canonical eight scenes that the Omi hakkei tradition had established around the southern shore of Lake Biwa since the medieval period, and the present catalogue entry stands as a parallel cataloguing of the same body of work that appears under the standard Omi hakkei designation elsewhere in the database. The Omi hakkei tradition, descended from the Chinese Xiao-Xiang model and naturalized to Japan through medieval poetry and painting, had been treated by every major ukiyo-e landscape designer before Shinsui took it up under Watanabe's direction in the late 1910s, and the cycle accordingly reads as the young artist's deliberate engagement with one of the most venerable inherited landscape subjects in the East Asian repertoire. Shinsui's contribution to the long Omi hakkei genealogy distinguished itself through the spare atmospheric register that the shin-hanga production method made possible, with low horizons, broad bokashi-graded fields of sky and water, and minimal figural staffage allowing the cycle's mood to be carried by tonal modulation rather than by anecdotal incident. The prints belong to the founding moment of the shin-hanga landscape program and stand alongside the contemporary fukei-e of Kawase Hasui and Yoshida Hiroshi as evidence that the publisher's revival of the woodblock medium addressed landscape as well as bijin-ga from the outset. As an alternative catalogue listing of the same Omi hakkei corpus, this entry preserves the variant romanization through which some impressions have entered Western collections, and the underlying series is comprehensively represented in the holdings of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other major museums of twentieth-century Japanese print where complete or near-complete sets allow direct comparison across the eight prescribed scenes.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Eight Views of Ohmi is an alternative romanization under which sheets from Ito Shinsui's Eight Views of Omi (Omi hakkei) cycle circulate in some Western cataloguing systems, the older Ohmi spelling preserving the long vowel that modern romanization rendered as Omi. The series, published by Watanabe Shozaburo across the years around 1917 and 1918 from Shinsui's designs, treats the canonical eight scenes that the Omi hakkei tradition had established around the southern shore of Lake Biwa since the medieval period, and the present catalogue entry stands as a parallel cataloguing of the same body of work that appears under the standard Omi hakkei designation elsewhere in the database. The Omi hakkei tradition, descended from the Chinese Xiao-Xiang model and naturalized to Japan through medieval poetry and painting, had been treated by every major ukiyo-e landscape designer before Shinsui took it up under Watanabe's direction in the late 1910s, and the cycle accordingly reads as the young artist's deliberate engagement with one of the most venerable inherited landscape subjects in the East Asian repertoire. Shinsui's contribution to the long Omi hakkei genealogy distinguished itself through the spare atmospheric register that the shin-hanga production method made possible, with low horizons, broad bokashi-graded fields of sky and water, and minimal figural staffage allowing the cycle's mood to be carried by tonal modulation rather than by anecdotal incident. The prints belong to the founding moment of the shin-hanga landscape program and stand alongside the contemporary fukei-e of Kawase Hasui and Yoshida Hiroshi as evidence that the publisher's revival of the woodblock medium addressed landscape as well as bijin-ga from the outset. As an alternative catalogue listing of the same Omi hakkei corpus, this entry preserves the variant romanization through which some impressions have entered Western collections, and the underlying series is comprehensively represented in the holdings of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other major museums of twentieth-century Japanese print where complete or near-complete sets allow direct comparison across the eight prescribed scenes.
The Eight Views of Ohmi series contains 2 prints, created by Ito Shinsui.
The Eight Views of Ohmi series was created by Ito Shinsui (伊東深水).
We currently have 1 of 2 known prints from the Eight Views of Ohmi series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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