Kawase Hasui prints are woodblock views of real places in Japan: a canal at first light, snow on a temple roof, surf breaking against black rocks. Hasui (1883 to 1957) was a Tokyo-born artist who designed these landscape prints from 1918 until the mid-twentieth century. He worked within shin hanga, the 'new prints' movement that gathered pace in Japan from the 1910s, and became one of its most prolific landscape designers.

What sets him apart is the feeling that each print shows a place he actually stood in, at a specific hour, in weather he had gone out to meet. Hasui travelled constantly, drew on the spot, and then handed his designs to professional carvers and printers, who turned them into graded colour and clean edges. In that collaboration, he extended a Japanese landscape-print tradition that reached back to Hokusai and Hiroshige, and made it fit twentieth-century Japan.

Who was Kawase Hasui?

He was born Bunjiro Kawase in Tokyo in 1883, the son of a merchant family. The expectation was that he would take over the family business, and for a time he tried. It didn't suit him. He wanted to draw, and eventually he found his way to the studio of Kaburaki Kiyokata, a leading painter of refined, modern young women in the Japanese style.

Kiyokata taught drawing and painting, not printmaking. Hasui stayed long enough to build the foundations he would use for the rest of his life, learning how to organise a scene, place figures, and keep a viewpoint clear. But he increasingly wanted to be out in the weather, looking at hills, harbours and streets.

Landscape woodblock prints weren't a new idea when Hasui came to them. In the nineteenth century, Hokusai, Hiroshige and their contemporaries had made the Japanese landscape print known around the world, and Hiroshige had built whole series around the stations of the Tōkaidō road. Hasui entered that line of work with different training and a twentieth-century setting. A painter first, he looked at the same country those earlier masters had pictured with an eye shaped by travel and the modern city.

How did he become a Japanese woodblock print artist?

Shin hanga, the movement Hasui joined, was built on an old division of labour. The publisher organised the work, and the artist supplied the design. Professional carvers cut the wooden blocks, and professional printers pulled each sheet. Unlike the creative print movement, where one artist did everything, shin hanga treated printmaking as a workshop trade, and it revived that trade for contemporary designs. Landscape was one of its central subjects, alongside beautiful women and actors.

Hasui came to it through a fellow student. Ito Shinsui had also studied under Kiyokata and had begun making landscape prints for the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo, including his Eight Views of Lake Biwa (Ōmi). When Hasui saw Shinsui's published landscapes, he recognised a way forward for his own scenery. In 1918 he approached Watanabe, who saw something he could publish and agreed to take him on.

The first designs Watanabe issued were views of the Shiobara region, published in 1918. They established what would remain Hasui's subject: actual places, drawn with the precision of a painter and printed with the clarity of the old workshop system. From the start, the pictures were recognisably landscapes of Japan, not generic scenery.

Watanabe also gave the work a wider audience. Shin hanga prints were made partly for foreign buyers, and Watanabe's editions reached collectors in the United States and Europe. A view of a Japanese country town or seashore could end up framed in a room far from the place it recorded.

Did he make paintings as well as prints?

Yes, and they were part of the same habit. Hasui travelled almost constantly around Japan, filling sketchbooks and painting watercolours of the places he passed through. These drawings and watercolours were his way of studying a place and trying out viewpoints. Some survive in museum collections today, and they show how much of the finished print began as direct observation.

A drawing or watercolour records one person looking. A woodblock print is a different object: the design has to be translated into carved shapes, colour areas and impressions, so the final sheet is a collaboration between the artist's line and the workshop's craft. When a surviving study sits next to a published print, you can see what survived the translation and what was simplified.

The Art Institute of Chicago holds five of his watercolours, which the museum dates from the 1920s to the 1940s. Among them are Suzukawa Coast on the Tokaido and Seven Big Stones at Shiobara Spa, from the hot-spring area of his first published prints.

How were his woodblock prints made?

Every published print involved several people, and none of them was incidental. Hasui designed the image, usually from his travel drawings. The publisher approved the design and coordinated the edition. A carver cut the lines and colour shapes into blocks of cherry or similar wood. A printer then took each block, applied pigment, and pulled sheets one at a time by hand. This wasn't a mechanical process, and small differences between impressions were part of the work.

The linework lived on a keyblock, a block cut with the main outlines of the design. Separate blocks carried the colour areas. Each sheet was printed from these in succession, and the printer kept them in register so the colour sat inside the lines. That alignment is what gives a fine shin hanga landscape print its crisp edges.

A printer made the soft skies with bokashi. He gradually thinned the pigment on a dampened block so the colour fell from deep to pale across the sheet. This dawn view across Lake Yamanaka (1931) relies on that technique for the pale colour spreading above Mount Fuji. The red-orange evening glow in this sunset harbour scene (1935) is a graded wash too, in a warmer key.

The keyblock could carry bold silhouettes while the colour blocks were printed with graded washes around them. This Beppu harbour at first light shows both at once: boats and waterfront buildings stand as dark shapes, and the yellow morning glow spreads behind them as a gradual wash. The crisp edges and the soft light were made by different people in the workshop, yet they sit together on the same sheet.

What happened to his work in the 1923 earthquake?

On 1 September 1923, the Great Kanto earthquake hit Tokyo and Yokohama, followed by fires that burned much of the city. Watanabe Shozaburo's premises were destroyed, along with printed stock, tools and many of the blocks used for earlier editions. Some of Hasui's designs couldn't simply be reprinted after the disaster because the material they depended on no longer existed.

Hasui also lost work on his side: preparatory drawings and sketchbooks went in the same fires. He and Watanabe began again, and in the years after the earthquake Hasui designed the Twenty Views of Tokyo series, begun in 1925, looking at his own rebuilt city.

The work that followed drew heavily on travel outside Tokyo. Hasui travelled to the Sea of Japan coast, the mountains, and down to Kyushu, sketching places that would become print designs for another three decades. Tokyo remained one of his subjects, sitting alongside the coastlines, mountains and towns he reached on those journeys.

Which landscapes are his most famous woodblock prints?

If one image stands for Hasui, it's Shiba Zojoji (1925), the Tokyo temple in snow. A woman walks past the red main gate of Zojoji under an umbrella, while snow falls on the roofs and weighs down the branches of a pine. It comes from his Twenty Views of Tokyo and became his best-selling work. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston holds an impression. It belongs to a line of snow scenes that runs through his career.

A winter river scene at Ushibori (1930) is a country snowfall: snow-edged riverbanks, distant roofs and snow-laden trees, the cold carried by crisp whites and cool blues. Pines at sunset in Hikawa Park (1930) is an evening in a few colours: tall dark trees against a deep blue sky, only their tops still lit orange before the light goes.

Night and weather gave him some of his strongest subjects. In Moon at Magome (1930), a full moon rises behind tall pines above a thatched farmhouse with one lit window. It became his second best-selling print.

Rain at Maekawa in Sagami (1932) makes falling rain the main subject, with fine lines of rain across the whole sheet. A lone walker with an umbrella goes down a street of thatched houses at night, and their lit windows are reflected in the wet road. Morning surf at Cape Inubō (1931) is weather of another kind, with white surf breaking around dark rocks and a band of red cloud at sunrise.

His calm dawn and dusk landscapes show two ways of handling still water. Fuji at dawn over a smooth lake (1931) sets the mountain against its reflection in the water. A shoreline village at dusk (1931) keeps everything low and horizontal, the land and boats quiet along the edge.

How did he depict Japan's cities and coasts?

An Osaka canal at dawn (1935) shows tall wooden houses over the water and a boatman poling his loaded boat through the morning mist. The still water gives the city the same calm he found in the countryside. A working waterfront in the spa town of Beppu shows early morning from the harbour side, with boats and buildings gathered at the water's edge.

The coast drew him again and again. A harbour under a red evening sky (1935) reduces the scene to a broad horizontal line and dark silhouettes, with almost no detail to identify the place. A northern morning sea at Bikuni (1933) takes the opposite approach: rows of waves break over brown rocks in the foreground, with a headland lit by the first sun far across the water. His view from inside Kojaku Cavern, on the Oga Peninsula, looks out between red rock walls at calm blue sea and two small islands.

What did Hasui make in his last years?

He kept designing landscapes into the 1950s. In 1956 he was named a Living National Treasure, and he died the following year, in November 1957. Three years before the honour, a government effort to preserve traditional printmaking had recorded the making of one of his prints through all 42 stages of its printing. The print was a new snow view of Zojoji, the temple he had drawn in 1925 for his best-known print.

Which landscape would you hang on your wall?

For a big wall, say an A1 print above a sofa, two of the large landscapes earn their size. This view of Mount Fuji reflected in Lake Yamanaka fills a wide space without crowding it: the mountain, the reflection and the pale graded sky give the eye somewhere to rest. If you prefer movement, this dawn scene over the sea at Cape Inubō offers surf breaking over dark rocks, the ocean doing all the work across the full width of the paper.

At A3 beside a desk, size and intimacy matter more. The winding river of Ecchu Umidani Pass pulls the eye into the hills, which gives a small print a surprising depth. For a calmer desk companion, this Dotonbori canal scene follows its water past tall wooden houses into the morning mist, the kind of picture you can glance at between tasks and feel the room quieten.

Beside a reading chair, A2 works well. This open sea at Bikuni gives you rolling waves and a sunlit headland, the print-world equivalent of looking up from a book toward the sea. The Kojaku Cavern design looks out from inside a cave to the open sea, if you want the view to feel more like a discovery.

For an entryway, where the picture is seen first by people coming in and has to hold up at a glance, we'd choose the harbour at sunset at A2. The red evening light and boat silhouettes read clearly from across a room. This Beppu waterfront at dawn reads just as clearly, in yellow morning light and inky blue. A black aluminium frame suits either, and our Kawase Hasui collection has these and more.

Did you know?

• Hasui designed woodblock prints over a career that lasted nearly forty years.
• He was born in Shiba, a district of Tokyo.
• In 1930 Hasui built a new house in Magome, the Tokyo district of his Moon at Magome.
• Lake Yamanaka, the lake in his 1931 dawn print, is the largest of the Fuji Five Lakes.
• The Kojaku Cavern he drew is a real rock formation on the Oga Peninsula in Akita Prefecture.
• The red gate in his Shiba Zojoji is the temple's Sangedatsumon, built in 1622 and now the oldest wooden building in Tokyo.

Questions people ask about Hasui and his prints

Who published Hasui's landscape prints, and who made them? Watanabe Shozaburo published most of Hasui's landscape prints. His small seal in a margin is one way to identify sheets from his workshop; professional carvers and printers made the finished print from Hasui's design.

Where can I see Hasui's woodblock prints? The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the British Museum all hold impressions. Their online collections are the easiest way to see the range.

Did Kawase Hasui paint or draw his landscapes? He worked in watercolour and drawing, but the finished works people collect are woodblock prints. The Art Institute of Chicago holds watercolours by him alongside his prints.

What is shin hanga? Shin hanga means 'new prints'. It was a Japanese print movement that began in the 1910s, led by the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo. It revived the old workshop system: an artist made the design, and professional carvers and printers made the print. Its main subjects were landscapes, beautiful women and actors. The movement declined after the Second World War.

Which Hasui print is most famous? Shiba Zojoji (1925), a snow view from his Twenty Views of Tokyo series, is the work most often used to represent him.

Posters from our collection

• Morning at Dotonbori (Kawase Hasui , 1935)
• Morning at Cape Inubō (Kawase Hasui , 1931)
• Morning Sea at Bikuni in Shiribeshi (Kawase Hasui, 1933)
• Ecchu Umidani Pass (Kawase Hasui , 1923)

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About the author

We're the team at Moryarty Vintage Posters. We find vintage posters in libraries, museums and private collections, restore each one by hand, and print them on fine art paper in our Barcelona workshop. Hasui's landscapes are among the work we most enjoy bringing back to the wall.

Sources

Hasui Kawase, Wikipedia

Kawase Hasui at the Art Institute of Chicago

Kawase Hasui at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Kawase Hasui at the British Museum

Shin hanga, Wikipedia