Prints of the Shinjuku Imperial Garden (Shinjuku Gyoen hanga)
Shinjuku Gyoen hanga
About This Series
Shinjuku Gyoen hanga, here rendered Prints of the Shinjuku Imperial Garden, is a small set of woodblock compositions in which Onchi Koshiro (1891-1955) turned to the imperial garden in western Tokyo as a recurrent motif. Established in the late nineteenth century on the site of a daimyo residence and developed across the Meiji and Taisho periods as a mixed Japanese, French formal, and English landscape park, Shinjuku Gyoen offered Onchi a designed landscape in which lawn, lily pond, conifer grove, and seasonal plantings could be treated as autonomous compositional motifs rather than as a topographical view of an identifiable Tokyo neighborhood. The Shinjuku Gyoen sheets exemplify the mature sosaku-hanga manner Onchi consolidated through the 1930s and early 1940s, in which the carved block is treated as the direct medium of the artist rather than as a reproductive vehicle, the editions are small and pulled by the artist or under his immediate supervision, and the design tends toward flattened areas of unmodulated color organized in rhythmic relationship rather than the spatial illusion of shin-hanga landscape. The garden subject also positions the series within the broader Ichimoku-kai concern for the city's reserve of cultivated nature, parallel to the Tokyo kaiko zue and Shin Tokyo hyakkei projects that Onchi organized with Hiratsuka Un'ichi, Maekawa Senpan, Sekino Junichiro, and others. Impressions of Shinjuku Gyoen hanga subjects are preserved in the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Honolulu Museum of Art among other major Western holdings of twentieth-century Japanese print.
Prints in This Series (2)
Frequently Asked Questions
Shinjuku Gyoen hanga, here rendered Prints of the Shinjuku Imperial Garden, is a small set of woodblock compositions in which Onchi Koshiro (1891-1955) turned to the imperial garden in western Tokyo as a recurrent motif. Established in the late nineteenth century on the site of a daimyo residence and developed across the Meiji and Taisho periods as a mixed Japanese, French formal, and English landscape park, Shinjuku Gyoen offered Onchi a designed landscape in which lawn, lily pond, conifer grove, and seasonal plantings could be treated as autonomous compositional motifs rather than as a topographical view of an identifiable Tokyo neighborhood. The Shinjuku Gyoen sheets exemplify the mature sosaku-hanga manner Onchi consolidated through the 1930s and early 1940s, in which the carved block is treated as the direct medium of the artist rather than as a reproductive vehicle, the editions are small and pulled by the artist or under his immediate supervision, and the design tends toward flattened areas of unmodulated color organized in rhythmic relationship rather than the spatial illusion of shin-hanga landscape. The garden subject also positions the series within the broader Ichimoku-kai concern for the city's reserve of cultivated nature, parallel to the Tokyo kaiko zue and Shin Tokyo hyakkei projects that Onchi organized with Hiratsuka Un'ichi, Maekawa Senpan, Sekino Junichiro, and others. Impressions of Shinjuku Gyoen hanga subjects are preserved in the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Honolulu Museum of Art among other major Western holdings of twentieth-century Japanese print.
The Prints of the Shinjuku Imperial Garden (Shinjuku Gyoen hanga) series contains 2 prints, created by Onchi Koshiro.
The Prints of the Shinjuku Imperial Garden (Shinjuku Gyoen hanga) series was created by Onchi Koshiro (恩地孝四郎).
We currently have 2 of 2 known prints from the Prints of the Shinjuku Imperial Garden (Shinjuku Gyoen hanga) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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