Japanese landscape printmaking developed as an important genre around 1830, with the work of the two dominant figures of landscape art: Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858). Their images of Japan found a ready market in the late Edo period, as society was increasingly obsessed with travel. Their publishers recognized that clientele from both Edo (now Tokyo) and the countryside would buy - and keep buying - the views of sacred Mt. Fuji, the oft-visited localities along the Tōkaidō and Kisokaidō roads, places of superb beauty throughout Japan, and, finally, the famous places in the splendid capital Edo. After Hiroshige's death, the genre of landscape printmaking went into a period of marked decline. His son-in-law, Hiroshige II (1826-1869), died young, and it was only in the 1880s that Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847-1915) revived landscape design: his series Views of Tokyo pictured the city after its first phase of transformation into a Western-style metropolis, with its new buildings as well as its areas of beauty, but also showing, for example, the great conflagration of parts of Tokyo in 1881. In this, Kiyochika represents a break with the past: his views are not just of famous places but also of events that influence the landscape. Kiyochika was an artist who sketched the city and transformed his sketched watercolors into atmospheric prints, which reflected what he actually saw rather than idealized or imaginary compositions, such as those in which Hiroshige excelled in his One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Kiyochika's 'journalistic' approach to landscape prints was new and fitted the Meiji period, with its rapid modernization, the emergence of newspapers, and the changes to censorship laws.

Kiyochika's popularity, stemming particularly from his horizontal landscape series, was revived in the last years of his life. As Henry Smith tells us,¹ the dramatist Kinoshita Mokutarō and the famous author Nagai Kafu expressed their appreciation for Kiyochika's urban landscapes out of nostalgia for Meiji Tokyo. Their influence was such that the prices of his prints shot up, a process that was accelerated by his death in 1915 and the subsequent emergence of extended articles about him in art magazines. When, in 1923, the Great Kantō Earthquake struck, the demand for his works mounted even further.² Kiyochika received attention from artists in both the Shin hanga and Sōsaku hanga traditions. The main publisher of Shin hanga prints, Watanabe Shōzaburō, was one of the biggest collectors of Kiyochika's work, and the artist Tsuchiya Koitsu (1870-1949), who also worked for Watanabe to produce Shin hanga-style landscapes, was one of Kiyochika's pupils.³ Oda Kazuma (1882-1956), a lithographer and a woodblock print designer who worked in both artistic traditions of printmaking, was not only deeply influenced by but also sharply critical of Kiyochika.⁴ Thus, Kiyochika was obviously well known in the period when landscape printmaking developed in the camps of both the Shin hanga and Sōsaku hanga artists. Kiyochika's legacy is all the more fascinating because of his role as one of the few connecting links between the traditions of the Ukiyo-e world and the new developments of the 20th century. In the past, the history of Japanese printmaking was often presented as being in some way discontinuous during the early decades of the 20th century, but the dialogue with the past continued and in fact blossomed during this time through the study of Ukiyo-e, as we can see in journals such as Record of Ukiyo-e (Ukiyo-e shi) and Research in Ukiyo-e (Ukiyo-e no kenkyu). Artists, collectors, authors, and scholars alike all participated in this interesting discourse.

In the early years of Shin hanga and Sōsaku hanga, relatively few urban landscape prints were produced. Apart from Kawase Hasui's (1883-1957) two series dating from 1920 (Twelve Views of Tokyo or Tokyo jūnikei, and the uncompleted set Twelve Months of Tokyo, or Tokyo jūnikagetsu), the urban landscape was a secondary subject. In the ten portfolios of the multi-artist series Prints of Landscapes in Japan (Nihon fūkei hanga), published between 1917-1920 under the guidance of Ishii Hakutei (1882-1958), virtually no urban scenery was included.

Notes
1. Smith, Henry D., Kiyochika Artist of Meiji Japan, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1988, p. 11
2. Smith, Henry D., Kiyochika p. 11

Related Entries