** A lovely early landscape design from one of the artist's untitled landscape series for Sanoya Kihei ** Artist: Katsukawa Shunsen 勝川春扇 (1762–c. 1830), from 1820 known as Katsukawa Shunkō II; pupil of Katsukawa Shun'ei Title: Gathering seaweed on the shore at sunrise Series: From one of Shunsen's untitled landscape series with the characteristic red cloud band, published by Sanoya Kihei (Kikakudō) Publisher: Sanoya Kihei 佐野屋喜兵衛 (Kikakudō) — publisher's seal at lower left Date: c. 1810–1820 Technique: Nishiki-e woodblock print on paper Format: Ōban yoko-e (horizontal ōban), 24 × 36 cm Signature: Shunsen ga 春扇画, lower right Reference: Andreas Marks, Publishers of Japanese Woodblock Prints: A Compendium, 2011, p. 174 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Condition Very good impression, vibrant colours. Repaired wormhole, a noted one at the top left margin — professionally restored and barely visible. There is also minor trimming, with the composition mainly preserved. The print has an Edo backing - a light think washi. --------------------------------------------------------------------- THE PRINT The sun is still only half out of the water. Shunsen puts it dead centre on the horizon as a flat red disc, lays a second band of red across the very top of the sheet, and leaves everything between the two almost empty — a wide pale expanse of shallow water drawn in nothing but thin orange ripple lines and a few sprigs of dark green weed. It is a remarkably confident piece of design: something like two-thirds of the sheet is given over to light and water, and the figures are pushed right down into the lower edge. They are working. A young woman in a striped purple kimono walks up the beach carrying a shallow basket; a bare-shouldered figure crouches over a wide tub, sleeves off, hands down in the water; at the right another woman in red and aubergine reaches across a bamboo drying frame. This is the low-tide harvest that fed Edo — done at dawn because that is when the tide allows it, not because it is picturesque. Shunsen's interest in the moment is entirely unsentimental, and that is what makes it work: the sunrise is doing the lyricism, and the people are simply getting on. The construction of the space is the other thing to notice. Shunsen was among the ukiyo-e designers most interested in Western-style perspective, and here he uses it not for a grand architectural vista but for a flat wet shoreline receding to a single low horizon — the kind of subject that would become the whole vocabulary of landscape printmaking under Hokusai and Hiroshige a generation later. The colours are restrained throughout: red, two greens, aubergine, ochre, against the bare tone of the paper. --------------------------------------------------- THE ARTIST: Katsukawa Shunsen began under the Rinpa painter Tsutsumi Tōrin III as Shunrin, joined Katsukawa Shun'ei around 1806–07, and designed prints for roughly fifteen years from about 1805. In 1820 he succeeded to the name Katsukawa Shunkō II; by the later 1820s he had given up printmaking altogether and turned to painting ceramics. He is best remembered for bijin-ga and for genre landscapes of exactly this kind — shore scenes, fishing, divers, travellers — handled with Western perspective and a distinctive cool palette. Impressions from his landscape series for Izumiya Ichibei and Sanoya Kihei are held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Bigelow Collection), the Library of Congress, and the Art Institute of Chicago.