Great Japanese Fish Picture Collection (Dai nihon gyorui gashu)

Ohno Bakufu's Great Japanese Fish Picture Collection (Dai nihon gyorui gashu), issued between 1937 and 1944, is the artist's central project and one of the most distinctive specialized publications of the shin-hanga decade. Ohno Bakufu (1888-1976) was trained in nihonga in Tokyo and had emerged in the 1920s as a designer working in the shin-hanga register established by Watanabe Shozaburo, contributing landscape and bird-and-flower subjects to the publishing programs of the new commercial revival of the woodblock. The Dai nihon gyorui gashu was conceived by the publisher Daiichi Shobo as an unprecedented systematic record of the marine and freshwater fish of the Japanese archipelago, and Bakufu was selected to translate the ichthyological subjects into the deluxe woodblock medium. The project was issued in successive volumes through the late 1930s and into the early war years, eventually comprising seventy-two plates each depicting one or several species against backgrounds suggesting their characteristic habitat: open sea, rocky shore, coral reef, or freshwater stream. The compositions employ the firm contour and graduated color of the shin-hanga register, with extensive use of bokashi gradations to render the play of light through water and the iridescent surface of fish scales, and the production values pitch the project as a scientific and aesthetic archive rather than as commercial decoration. Each plate is identified by a cartouche giving the species name in Japanese and Linnaean Latin, and the series was offered to natural-history institutions and serious collectors as both an aesthetic object and a documentary record. The Dai nihon gyorui gashu belongs to a small but distinctive shin-hanga genre of specialized scientific publication, alongside Yoshimura Kotaro's botanical plates and the various ornithological projects of the period, and impressions are catalogued in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the natural-history collections of the Smithsonian and the Tokyo National Museum, where the project figures as one of the more distinctive specialized statements of late-1930s Japanese print culture.

The Great Japanese Fish Picture Collection (Dai nihon gyorui gashu) series contains 1 prints, created by Ohno Bakufu.

The Great Japanese Fish Picture Collection (Dai nihon gyorui gashu) series was created by Ohno Bakufu (大野麦風).

We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Great Japanese Fish Picture Collection (Dai nihon gyorui gashu) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.