TAKEHISA YUMEJI • 山之湖 • 日本木版画 - 日本 - 20世紀

Artist: Takehisa Yumeji (竹久夢二, 1884–1934)
Title: Mountain Lake
Series: 竹久夢二木版画集 — A Collection of Takehisa Yumeji's Pictures in Woodblock Print
Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga), polychrome with soft bokashi shading
Date: c. 1978–1980 (after an early-20th-century Taishō painting design)
Publisher: Kyoto Hanga-in (京都版画院)
Format: Large format — ca. 49.5 x 38.5 cm
Signature & Seals: Title inscribed and Yumeji signature with red seal at lower left; series title and publisher seal (京都版画院版) in the margins; carver and printer seals at left
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IMPRESSION & COLOUR

A delicately printed sheet built almost entirely in soft, unsaturated tones.

PAPER & CONDITION

Excellent. The sheet is intact.
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The Scene

A two-panel landscape printed together on a single sheet, in the loose, painterly manner that made Yumeji the great romantic of the Taishō age. Right panel: a solitary gentleman in Western dress — silk top hat, overcoat and walking stick — stands on the shore beneath a sinuous flowering tree, gazing across the water to a conical peak (Mt. Haruna) under a low, wind-streaked sky. Left panel: the broader lake, glassy and still, with a lone angler in a small boat and pale mountains beyond, one slope washed in deep blue. The muted palette of greys, soft blues and earth-browns, with the woodgrain (mokume) left visible in sky and water, gives the whole an atmospheric, melancholic calm.
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The Series

This sheet shows Yumeji's signature subject at its most characteristic: the wistful, slender "Yumeji-shiki bijin" — a type modelled in large part on his first wife Tamaki — caught in a quiet moment beneath blossoming plum, a wicker basket cradled in her arms. These images of women with large, melancholy eyes had a major influence on the world of Japanese art, and the pairing of a solitary beauty with ume blossom — one of the most loaded seasonal motifs in Japanese painting, signalling quiet resilience and the first stirrings of spring — sits comfortably within the lyrical, Taishō-romantic mood for which Yumeji remains best known.
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Takehisa Yumeji — Poet of the Taishō Beauty

Takehisa Yumeji (1884–1934) was the leading artist-illustrator of Japan's Taishō era, and a poet and songwriter besides. His romantic portraits of slender, languid young women — drawn with expressive line and a wistful, almost childlike air — were enormously popular, and he designed prints, covers, and illustrations for newspapers, women's magazines, and books. The look became known simply as "Yumeji-style" beauty.

There was little interest in his work abroad during his lifetime, but in the decades since his death Yumeji's images have been keenly sought by collectors. A museum devoted to him stands in Okayama, his birthplace.