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Yokohama kenbutsu zue - Public domain portrait painting
Summary
Japanese print shows a foreign visitor standing outside a building in Yokohama, Japan. He is looking up and appears to be thinking, his thoughts depicted on the right, outside the space occupied by him, as a framed bust portrait of a woman, possibly his wife, and a clock, possibly a reference to the time that they have been apart.
Signature: Issen Yoshikazu ga.
Seal date: Monkey 11.
From series entitled: Yokohama kenbutsu zue (Sights in Yokohama).
Annotations, stamps, etc. on verso of print: 47623a (white label); 85-; LC2585.
Inscriptions: Shashinkyō (Photographic mirror), Tokei shashin amerika (Picture of an American clock).
Earlier control number: 9942.25-6.
Gift; Mrs. E. Crane Chadbourne; 1930; (DLC/PP-1930:47623a).
Forms part of: Chadbourne collection of Japanese prints (Library of Congress).
Images from the Floating World: the Japanese print / Richard Lane. New York : G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1978, p. 348, ill. 728 (entitled Foreign melange).
Woodblock printing in Japan (木版画, moku-hanga) is a technique best known for its use in the ukiyo-e artistic genre of single sheets, but it was also used for printing books in the same period. Woodblock printing had been used in China for centuries to print books, long before the advent of movable type, but was widely adopted in Japan during the Edo period (1603-1868). Woodblock printing appeared in Japan at the beginning of Edo period, when Tokugawa shogunate was ruled by the Japanese society. This technique originated from China, where it was used to print books for many centuries. Its original name is ‘moku-hanga’ and it has a wide usage in artistic genre of ‘ukiyo-e’. As opposed to western tradition, where artists used oil-based inks for woodcuts, moku-hanga technique uses water-based inks. That is why those prints had colors so vivid, as well as glazes, and transparency. This collection describes Japanese printmaking different schools and movements. The most notable of them were: - From 1700: Torii school - From 1700-1714: Kaigetsudō school - From 1720s: Katasukawa school, including the artists Shunsho and Shuntei - From 1725: Kawamata school including the artists Suzuki Harunobu and Koryusai - From 1786: Hokusai school, including the artists Hokusai, Hokuei and Gakutei - From 1794: Kitagawa school, including the artists Utamaro I, Kikumaro I and II - From 1842: Utagawa school, including the artists Kunisada and Hiroshige - From 1904: Sōsaku-hanga, "Creative Prints" movement - From 1915: Shin-hanga "New Prints" school, including Hasui Kawase and Hiroshi Yoshida Woodblock prints were provided by the Library of Congress and cover the period from 1600 to 1980.
This is a collection is depicting interactions with Westerners visiting Japan from the latter half of the Edo period to the beginning of the Meiji period. Many artists started to document the rapid modernization of Japan. Their prints became more industrial, and in some cases depicting European tourists and their “strange” habits.
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