Eight Views of Omi

Eight Views of Omi (Omi hakkei) is the cycle of eight Lake Biwa landscapes that Ito Shinsui designed for the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo across the years around 1917 and 1918, one of the founding shin-hanga landscape projects and the most fully developed of the database's parallel cataloguings of the same body of work. The Omi hakkei tradition, inherited from the Chinese Xiao-Xiang eight-view 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 its canonical roster of subjects, including the autumn moon at Ishiyama, the evening snow at Hira, the returning sails at Yabase, the evening glow at the Karahashi bridge at Seta, the evening bell at Mii Temple, the descending geese at the Ukimido pavilion at Katada, the night rain at the propped pine at Karasaki, and the clear breeze at Awazu, supplied Shinsui with a prescribed program of scenes that subordinated topographical novelty to lyrical mood. Working in his late teens under Watanabe's direction, Shinsui translated each prescribed scene into a composition of broad bokashi-graded sky and water, low horizon, and minimal graphic punctuation, producing a set whose restraint distinguished it sharply from the more anecdotally populated Edo treatments of the same theme and aligned it with the simultaneous landscape work of Kawase Hasui within Watanabe's early shin-hanga program. The Watanabe workshop's separately trained block carvers and printers carried Shinsui's drawings through with the subtle gradations and careful registration that became the publisher's signature, and the cycle stands as one of the projects through which the shin-hanga production method first demonstrated its capacity to handle classical landscape subjects with a modern atmospheric refinement. Within Shinsui's career the Omi hakkei runs in parallel with the contemporary bijin-ga that was beginning to occupy the larger share of his Watanabe output, and modern scholarship reads the landscape series as the laboratory in which he developed the atmospheric 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, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and other major collections, where complete or near-complete sets preserve early Watanabe printings whose register and pigment work distinguish them from postwar restrikes.

The Eight Views of Omi series contains 1 prints, created by Ito Shinsui.

The Eight Views of Omi series was created by Ito Shinsui (伊東深水).

We currently have 9 of 1 known prints from the Eight Views of Omi series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.