Tsuruta Gorō — Yoshiwara no Fuji (Mount Fuji seen from Yoshiwara) — Shōwa Shin-Hanga, Pencil-Signed - Japan - 20th century

** One of only a handful of woodblock designs by the yōga painter Tsuruta Gorō. A minimalist masterpiece: a wind-bent pine, a grazing horse, and Fuji dissolving into autumn in an excellent condition **

Artist: Tsuruta Gorō 鶴田吾郎 (1890–1969)
Title: 吉原の冨士 — Yoshiwara no Fuji, "Mount Fuji seen from Yoshiwara"
Signature: 吾郎 (Gorō) in the block, lower right, with red artist's seal; pencil-signed G. Tsuruta in the lower margin
Date: Shōwa period; c. 1926–1930s
Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga), colour on hand-made washi with deckle edge
Format: Horizontal (yoko-e), sheet approx. 40 × 27 cm
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Paper & condition

Excellent with no issues to note!
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ABOUT THE PRINT

Yoshiwara here is not the Edo pleasure quarter but Yoshiwara-juku, the fourteenth station of the Tōkaidō in Suruga province — today part of Fuji City in Shizuoka. It was one of the classic Fuji-viewing points of the old highway, the place where the road bends and the mountain appears on the traveller's left, the celebrated hidari Fuji. Hokusai and Hiroshige both took the view. Tsuruta takes it and empties it.

What is left is four things. A pine, wind-twisted and half-dead, cutting a black diagonal up the centre of the sheet and splaying its branches across the sky. A saddled horse, unattended, head down in the dry autumn grass. Two hay ricks at the right. And behind all of it, held back by a wash of haze, the snow-streaked cone of Fuji in the palest apricot and grey. There are no figures, no road, no travellers — nothing to tell you what century it is. The whole composition is carried by the contrast between the harsh calligraphic drawing of the pine trunk and the almost weightless bokashi of the mountain and sky.

The printing is the other half of the argument. This is a full shin-hanga production, and it holds its own against anything coming out of the same period from the major publishing houses: heavy hand-made washi with the deckle edge intact, deep even bokashi across the sky, delicate graded washes in the mountain, and a dry-brush goma-zuri texture worked into the hay ricks and the bark. The register is exact across a design that leaves no margin for error, since almost every element sits against open paper. Nothing about the paper or the impression is a step down from the better-known names of the movement.

Tsuruta Gorō is not, primarily, a printmaker. He was a yōga (Western-style) painter — a Waseda dropout who trained under Kurata Hakuyō and Nakamura Fusetsu, exhibited at the Imperial Academy from the early 1920s with his Portrait of the Blind Eroshenko, and later became a prolific war artist and a founder of the Japan Mountain Forest Fine Arts Association. His woodblock output was small and confined largely to the mid-1920s and 1930s, published through Katō Junji. Two designs — Yoshida Guchi no Fuji and Ōhira Pass — account for nearly all of what collectors ever see. This one is not among them, and appears on the market only rarely.