Collection of Views of Japan
About This Series
Collection of Views of Japan is the English designation for one of Tsuchiya Koitsu's landscape cycles, a body of meisho-e prints through which the artist addressed the Japanese landscape across his mature shin-hanga career for the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo. Tsuchiya Koitsu, born in 1870 in Shizuoka Prefecture and trained from the late 1880s in the workshop of the great Meiji print designer Kobayashi Kiyochika, spent the early decades of his career in close association with the Kiyochika studio and produced a sustained body of newspaper illustration, sumi-e painting, and yoga work before his association with the Watanabe shin-hanga program in the late 1920s, when he was already nearly sixty years old. The Watanabe association of Koitsu's late career, which extended from around 1931 until his death in 1949, produced the body of landscape and place-portrait prints through which he is now principally known, and these mature shin-hanga designs draw on the topographical and atmospheric vocabulary that Kiyochika had developed in his Meiji period kosen-ga or light-ray prints, translated through the shin-hanga production system into a more thoroughly atmospheric register. The Collection of Views of Japan cycle accordingly belongs to the body of mature landscape work through which Koitsu addressed Japanese sites across the 1930s and 1940s in dialogue with the parallel landscape programs of Kawase Hasui and Yoshida Hiroshi, the three artists supplying the principal shin-hanga landscape vocabulary of the interwar period through their distinct but related approaches. Koitsu's particular contribution to the shin-hanga landscape tradition lay in his sustained engagement with nocturnal and atmospheric effects, with snow and rain subjects, and with the dramatic lighting that his Kiyochika training had given him an unusually refined command of, and the Collection of Views accordingly emphasizes the kind of mood-driven place portrait that distinguished his work from Hasui's more topographically organized cycles. The collaborative shin-hanga production method, in which Watanabe's separately trained block carvers and printers carried through the artist's drawing under the publisher's coordinating direction, allowed the cycle to achieve the layered bokashi gradations and atmospheric overprinting that Koitsu's subjects demanded. Within Koitsu's career the cycle belongs to the late mature period that produced his most internationally collected designs, and modern scholarship treats his Watanabe landscape work as one of the three principal landscape programs of the interwar shin-hanga movement. 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 Western collections of twentieth-century Japanese print.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Collection of Views of Japan is the English designation for one of Tsuchiya Koitsu's landscape cycles, a body of meisho-e prints through which the artist addressed the Japanese landscape across his mature shin-hanga career for the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo. Tsuchiya Koitsu, born in 1870 in Shizuoka Prefecture and trained from the late 1880s in the workshop of the great Meiji print designer Kobayashi Kiyochika, spent the early decades of his career in close association with the Kiyochika studio and produced a sustained body of newspaper illustration, sumi-e painting, and yoga work before his association with the Watanabe shin-hanga program in the late 1920s, when he was already nearly sixty years old. The Watanabe association of Koitsu's late career, which extended from around 1931 until his death in 1949, produced the body of landscape and place-portrait prints through which he is now principally known, and these mature shin-hanga designs draw on the topographical and atmospheric vocabulary that Kiyochika had developed in his Meiji period kosen-ga or light-ray prints, translated through the shin-hanga production system into a more thoroughly atmospheric register. The Collection of Views of Japan cycle accordingly belongs to the body of mature landscape work through which Koitsu addressed Japanese sites across the 1930s and 1940s in dialogue with the parallel landscape programs of Kawase Hasui and Yoshida Hiroshi, the three artists supplying the principal shin-hanga landscape vocabulary of the interwar period through their distinct but related approaches. Koitsu's particular contribution to the shin-hanga landscape tradition lay in his sustained engagement with nocturnal and atmospheric effects, with snow and rain subjects, and with the dramatic lighting that his Kiyochika training had given him an unusually refined command of, and the Collection of Views accordingly emphasizes the kind of mood-driven place portrait that distinguished his work from Hasui's more topographically organized cycles. The collaborative shin-hanga production method, in which Watanabe's separately trained block carvers and printers carried through the artist's drawing under the publisher's coordinating direction, allowed the cycle to achieve the layered bokashi gradations and atmospheric overprinting that Koitsu's subjects demanded. Within Koitsu's career the cycle belongs to the late mature period that produced his most internationally collected designs, and modern scholarship treats his Watanabe landscape work as one of the three principal landscape programs of the interwar shin-hanga movement. 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 Western collections of twentieth-century Japanese print.
The Collection of Views of Japan series contains 1 prints, created by Tsuchiya Koitsu.
The Collection of Views of Japan series was created by Tsuchiya Koitsu (土屋光逸).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the Collection of Views of Japan series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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