Ten Views of Nara
About This Series
Ten Views of Nara, registered in Japanese tradition as Nara jukkei, is among the topographical print suites in which Hiratsuka Un'ichi (1895-1997) turned his sosaku-hanga discipline to the ancient capital and its surrounding Buddhist landscape, a subject that drew the artist on multiple occasions across his Japanese career and that fused his lifelong attachment to temple architecture and Buddhist iconography with the regional meisho or famous-place tradition. Nara, the Nara-period capital from 710 to 794 and the location of the great Todaiji, Kofukuji, Horyuji, Yakushiji, and Kasuga shrine complexes, offered Hiratsuka the architectural and ritual subjects he had been cutting since the 1920s, including pagodas, gate structures, kondo halls, and the deer-populated precincts of the Nara Park area. Each of the ten sheets is executed in the artist's signature black-and-white sumizuri-e idiom, printed in carbon sumi on washi from cherry blocks cut directly without preparatory transfer in keeping with the jiga jikoku jizuri doctrine of self-drawn, self-carved, and self-printed woodblock that Hiratsuka had done more than any contemporary to codify within the Nihon Sosaku-Hanga Kyokai. The compositions weight broadly massed darks against reserved areas of paper to register the timber, tile, and stone of the Nara architectural fabric, and the ten-view jukkei format situates the suite within a tradition running from the Chinese Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang through the Edo-period regional jukkei sets that had structured woodblock topography for centuries. Issued from Hiratsuka's own workshop rather than through a commercial publisher, the Nara suite is documented in the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Tokyo National Museum, and the Hiratsuka Un'ichi Print Museum in Suzaka.
Prints in This Series (2)
Frequently Asked Questions
Ten Views of Nara, registered in Japanese tradition as Nara jukkei, is among the topographical print suites in which Hiratsuka Un'ichi (1895-1997) turned his sosaku-hanga discipline to the ancient capital and its surrounding Buddhist landscape, a subject that drew the artist on multiple occasions across his Japanese career and that fused his lifelong attachment to temple architecture and Buddhist iconography with the regional meisho or famous-place tradition. Nara, the Nara-period capital from 710 to 794 and the location of the great Todaiji, Kofukuji, Horyuji, Yakushiji, and Kasuga shrine complexes, offered Hiratsuka the architectural and ritual subjects he had been cutting since the 1920s, including pagodas, gate structures, kondo halls, and the deer-populated precincts of the Nara Park area. Each of the ten sheets is executed in the artist's signature black-and-white sumizuri-e idiom, printed in carbon sumi on washi from cherry blocks cut directly without preparatory transfer in keeping with the jiga jikoku jizuri doctrine of self-drawn, self-carved, and self-printed woodblock that Hiratsuka had done more than any contemporary to codify within the Nihon Sosaku-Hanga Kyokai. The compositions weight broadly massed darks against reserved areas of paper to register the timber, tile, and stone of the Nara architectural fabric, and the ten-view jukkei format situates the suite within a tradition running from the Chinese Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang through the Edo-period regional jukkei sets that had structured woodblock topography for centuries. Issued from Hiratsuka's own workshop rather than through a commercial publisher, the Nara suite is documented in the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Tokyo National Museum, and the Hiratsuka Un'ichi Print Museum in Suzaka.
The Ten Views of Nara series contains 2 prints, created by Hiratsuka Un'ichi.
The Ten Views of Nara series was created by Hiratsuka Un'ichi (平塚運一).
We currently have 2 of 2 known prints from the Ten Views of Nara series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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