Kawase Hasui 40 Prints

Hasui Kawase (川瀬 巴水, May 18, 1883 – November 7, 1957) was a Japanese artist that took up ukiyo-e printing as it disappeared as a commercial printing form and instead became an art for its own sake, so to say.

In Hokusai and Hiroshige´s time, first half of the 1800s, ukiyo-e prints were cheap – around the price of a bowl of soup -and filled the market which would later develop in postcards and magazines.

Hasui designed traditional prints in a western style, mostly landscapes, often with special lighting effects like evening og night and special weather conditions- he was fond of showing temples and shrines in snow.

He worked closely with a single publisher – Shōzaburō Watanabe – throughout his life. The Great Kantō earthquake in 1923 destroyed Watanabe’s workshop, including the finished woodblocks for the yet-undistributed prints and Hasui’s sketchbooks. He lost 188 sketchbooks in which he had drawn landscapes and other subjects.

In 1956, he was named a Japanese Living National Treasure. The government Committee for the Preservation of Intangible Cultural Treasures had intended to honor traditional printmaking via awards to Hasui and Ito Shinsui in 1953.