Taiso Yoshitoshi

Mt. Yoshino Midnight Moon (Yoshinoyama Yowa No Tsuki)

1886

The Bathers Woodengraving, 1873 As published in Harper's Weekly, August 2, 1873 (p. 668) Provenance: Wunderlich & Co., Inc., New York, NY (Their stock no. 84.003.8 in pencil recto a...

Shunga: Twelve Signs of the Zodiac - Goat Color woodcut with gauffrage (embossing) Unsigned (as usual) Format: Shikishiban Publisher: Privately produced Unusually well preserved with the fugitive blue still intact Image size: 5-1/8 x 5-3/4" Sheet size: 5 3/8 x 6 1/4" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia In this Japanese name, the surname is Isoda. Isoda Koryūsai (礒田 湖龍斎, 1735–1790) was a Japanese ukiyo-e print designer and painter active from 1769 to 1790. Life and career Koryūsai was born in 1735 and worked as a samurai in the service of the Tsuchiya clan. He became a masterless rōnin after the death of the head of the clan and moved to Edo (modern Tokyo) where he settled near Ryōgoku Bridge in the Yagenbori area. He became a print designer there under the art name Haruhiro in 1769, at first making samurai-themed designs. The ukiyo-e print master Harunobu died in 1770, and about that time Koryūsai began making prints in a similar style of life in the pleasure districts. Koryūsai was a prolific designer of individual prints and print series,[1] most of which appeared between 1769 and 1881. In 1782, Koryūsai applied for and received the Buddhist honour hokkyō ("Bridge of the Law") from the imperial court and thereafter used the title as part of his signature. His output slowed from this time, though he continued to design prints until his death in 1790. Works Koryūsai created a total of 2,500 known designs, or an average of four a week. According to art historian Allen Hockley, "Koryūsai may ... have been the most productive artist of the eighteenth century". The series Models for Fashion: New Designs as Fresh Young Leaves (Hinagata wakana no hatsumoyō, 1776–1781) ran for 140 prints, the longest known ukiyo-e print series of beauties. He designed at least 350 hashira-e pillar prints, numerous kachō-e bird-and-flower prints, a great number of shunga erotic prints, and others. Ninety of his nikuhitsu-ga paintings are known, making him one of the most productive painters of the period. Legacy Despite Koryūsai's productivity and popularity—both in his time and amongst later collectors—his work has attracted little scholarship. The first ukiyo-e histories written in the West in the 19th century elevated certain artists as exemplars; Koryūsai's work came to be seen as too indebted to Harunobu, who died in 1770, and inferior to that of Kiyonaga, whose peak period came in the 1880s. An example is Woldemar von Seidlitz's Geschichte des japanischen Farbenholzschnittes ("History of Japanese colour prints", 1897), the most popular of the early ukiyo-e histories, which paints Koryūsai as a successor to Harunobu and a rival of Kiyonaga in the 1770s who slipped into mediocrity and imitation of his rival by the end of the decade.[5] Interest lay mainly in the details of Koryūsai's life—a samurai who received court honours was unusual in the proletarian world of ukiyo-e. In 2021, contemporary woodblock printmaker David Bull...

Actor Arashi Rikan II as Aburaya Yohei - Figurative Woodblock Print on Paper Woodblock print of kabuki actor by Shunbaisai Hokuei (Japanes...

"Grave of Santa Anna's Leg" Original Woodblock Print, Signed Artist's Proof Boldly colored woodblock print by Carol Summers (American, 1925-2016). This piece is a segment of a grave, with a headstone that has a skull and cross. There are two bright green plants flanking the headstone. Below the headstone and plants, there is a large arched blue shape, with a crescent moon and stars. A red leg, bent at the knee, cuts across the blue arch. Signed "Carol Summers" along the right edge of the blue shape. Numbered and titled "A/P Grave of Sant Anna's Leg" along the left edge of the blue shape. Presented in a silver colored aluminum frame. Frame size: 32.245"H x 27.25"W Paper size: 29.75"H x 24.5"W Carol Summers (1925-2016) has worked as an artist throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the first years of the next, outliving most of his mid-century modernist peers. Initially trained as a painter, Summers was drawn to color woodcuts around 1950 and it became his specialty thereafter. Over the years he has developed a process and style that is both innovative and readily recognizable. His art is known for it’s large scale, saturated fields of bold color, semi-abstract treatment of landscapes from around the world and a luminescent quality achieved through a printmaking process he invented. In a career that has extended over half a century, Summers has hand-pulled approximately 245 woodcuts in editions that have typically run from 25 to 100 in number. His talent was both inherited and learned. Born in 1925 in Kingston, a small town in upstate New York, Summers was raised in nearby Woodstock with his older sister, Mary. His parents were both artists who had met in art school in St. Louis. During the Great Depression, when Carol was growing up, his father supported the family as a medical illustrator until he could return to painting. His mother was a watercolorist and also quite knowledgeable about the different kinds of papers used for various kinds of painting. Many years later, Summers would paint or print on thinly textured paper originally collected by his mother. From 1948 to 1951, Carol Summers trained in the classical fine and studio arts at Bard College and at the Art Students League of New York. He studied painting with Steven Hirsh and printmaking with Louis Schanker. He admired the shapes and colors favored by early modernists Paul Klee (Sw: 1879-1940) and Matt Phillips (Am: b.1927- ). After graduating, Summers quit working as a part-time carpenter and cabinetmaker (which had supported his schooling and living expenses) to focus fulltime on art. That same year, an early abstract, Bridge No. 1 was selected for a Purchase Prize in a competition sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum. In 1952, his work (Cathedral, Construction and Icarus) was shown the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in an exhibition of American woodcuts...