Kawase Hasui “Night Rain at Omiya”, 1930
Born in May of 1883, Hasui Kawase was one of modern Japan’s most important and prolific printmakers. He was a prominent founder of the shin-hanga, or new prints, movement whose artists executed traditional subjects in a style influenced by Western art.
At the age of twenty six, Hasui ceased working at his family’s rope and thread wholesaling business and studied Western style painting under Yōga-style artist Okada Saburōsuke for two years. Hasui then approached Nihonga artist Kiyokata Kaburagi, the leading master of the bijin-ga genre, to teach him; it was Kiyokata who gave him the name ‘Hasui’, which translates as ‘water gushing from a spring’.
At the studio of Kiyokata, Hasui studied traditional Japanese painting and ukiyo-e, a genre of art which flourished from the seventeenth though the nineteenth centuries.. He worked almost exclusively on landscape and townscape prints based on sketches and watercolors he made during travels around Japan. Hasui’s work depicted not only those famous places typical of early ukiyo-e masters, but also featured locales which were obscure in urbanizing Japan. Unlike other artists, he did include the captions and titles that were standard in traditional ukiyo-e prints. Among Hasui’s most original and best known works were his snow scenes rendered with naturalistic light, shade and texture.
During a career which spanned over forty years, Hasui designed approximately six hundred-twenty prints and worked closely with publisher Shōzaburō Watanabe, an advocate of the shin-hanga movement. Through the efforts of American art patron Robert Miller, his work became widely known in the West. In late 1953, the government Committee for the Preservation of Intangible Cultural Treasures commissioned Hasui to make a collection of traditionally-made prints. The production of these works were carefully documented and, in 1956, he was named a Japanese Living National Treasure.
Hasui Kawase died on November 27, 1957 at the age of seventy-four. He left a large collection of his woodblock prints and watercolors, many of which are linked to the woodblock prints, oil paintings, traditional hanging scrolls, and several folding screens. In 1979, Author Narazaki Munishige published Hasui’s biography and compiled the first comprehensive, annotated listing of all his known works