Twelve Views of Nagasaki
About This Series
Takehisa Yumeji's Twelve Views of Nagasaki belongs to the lyrical regional cycles through which the artist extended his Taisho-era bijin and design sensibility to specific Japanese localities of literary and historical resonance. Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934) had established himself in the 1900s and 1910s as the principal poet-illustrator of the Taisho Romantic moment, the artist whose elongated melancholy bijin defined the popular visual idiom of the period through his contributions to illustrated magazines, sheet-music covers, and the bestselling Yumeji gashu albums, and whose graphic practice cut across the boundaries between fine print, commercial design, and the broader visual culture of urban Taisho Japan. The Twelve Views of Nagasaki, generally dated to the mid-1920s, registers Yumeji's engagement with the southern port city whose unique history as the principal site of pre-Meiji Western contact had made it a charged subject for the Taisho literary imagination, the geography of Madame Butterfly and of the Dutch trading post on Dejima, of the Christian persecutions, and of the post-Restoration mixed quarter that retained an air of foreign romance. The cycle organizes its subjects under the conventional meisho framework of twelve views, gathering harbor and street scenes, foreign-style architecture, and bijin compositions in which Yumeji's characteristic melancholy female figure occupies the landscape of the port. The compositions are drawn in his distinctive register, with the elongated melancholy contour translated into woodblock form through the firm line and selective graduated color characteristic of his print practice, and the project belongs alongside his other regional cycles of the 1920s. Impressions are catalogued among the Yumeji holdings of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Takehisa Yumeji Museum in Tokyo, and the Yumeji Art Museum in Okayama, the artist's home prefecture.
Prints in This Series (2)
Frequently Asked Questions
Takehisa Yumeji's Twelve Views of Nagasaki belongs to the lyrical regional cycles through which the artist extended his Taisho-era bijin and design sensibility to specific Japanese localities of literary and historical resonance. Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934) had established himself in the 1900s and 1910s as the principal poet-illustrator of the Taisho Romantic moment, the artist whose elongated melancholy bijin defined the popular visual idiom of the period through his contributions to illustrated magazines, sheet-music covers, and the bestselling Yumeji gashu albums, and whose graphic practice cut across the boundaries between fine print, commercial design, and the broader visual culture of urban Taisho Japan. The Twelve Views of Nagasaki, generally dated to the mid-1920s, registers Yumeji's engagement with the southern port city whose unique history as the principal site of pre-Meiji Western contact had made it a charged subject for the Taisho literary imagination, the geography of Madame Butterfly and of the Dutch trading post on Dejima, of the Christian persecutions, and of the post-Restoration mixed quarter that retained an air of foreign romance. The cycle organizes its subjects under the conventional meisho framework of twelve views, gathering harbor and street scenes, foreign-style architecture, and bijin compositions in which Yumeji's characteristic melancholy female figure occupies the landscape of the port. The compositions are drawn in his distinctive register, with the elongated melancholy contour translated into woodblock form through the firm line and selective graduated color characteristic of his print practice, and the project belongs alongside his other regional cycles of the 1920s. Impressions are catalogued among the Yumeji holdings of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Takehisa Yumeji Museum in Tokyo, and the Yumeji Art Museum in Okayama, the artist's home prefecture.
The Twelve Views of Nagasaki series contains 1 prints, created by Takehisa Yumeji.
The Twelve Views of Nagasaki series was created by Takehisa Yumeji (竹久夢二).
We currently have 2 of 1 known prints from the Twelve Views of Nagasaki series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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