Kawase Hasui 40 Prints

<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p>