Japanese Woodblock Print, 1964, 1st/only edition, published by Shozaburo Watanabe

SIZE IN INCHES: oban, 11 x 14.25 inches

COMMENTS: The series Clock and Beauty (Tokei to Bijin) was commissioned by the watchmaker Hotta, and the prints were carved, printed and published by Shozaburo Watanabe. The designs for the four prints came from paintings made by Ito Shinsui in the 1950s, and show various beauties with a distinctive clock in the background. The women are each from a different Japanese era - Edo, Meiji, Showa before WWII, and finally number IV showing a modern woman of the 1950s. The bijin are shown with typical attire and hair-do of their era.

ITO SHINSUI (1898-1972) was born "Hajime" at Fukugawa in downtown Tokyo on February 4, 1898. His family initially enjoyed the economic benefits of the Sino-Japanese War boom, but while he was in elementary school, their fortunes changed and Shinsui had to leave school to work, first at a sign shop and then as a factory hand at the Tokyo Printing Company. Shinsui's talent in drawing and painting led him to an apprenticeship in the design section of the company in 1911, and through its senior staff he was introduced to Kaburagi Kiyokata (1878-1972), a genre artist known particularly for his images of beautiful women. Kiyokata is credited with elevating the traditional ukiyo-e genre to a legitimate category of modern nihonga painting. On taking the aspiring young painter (Hajime) under his wing, Kiyokata have him the art name Shinsui.

In 1916 Shinsui's talents attracted the attention of Watanabe Shozaburo when the shin hanga publisher saw the artist's painting 'Before the Mirror'. With Kiyokata's consent Watanabe persuaded the young artist to begin to design works for him to produce as woodblocks, of which a version of 'Before the Mirror' was the first in July 1916. From that time until Watanabe's death in 1962 Watanabe and Shinsui collaborated on over sixty landscape prints and about 100 others, mostly of beautiful women (bijinga). Shinsui occasionally worked for other publishers even before 1962. His series 'Eight Views of Lake Biwa' set standards for the landscape print which were taken up by Yoshida Hiroshi and by another Kiyokata pupil, Kawase Hasui. Once Hasui had specialized in landscape, Shinsui confined himself more to 'bijinga' in prints, and increasingly in paintings, which always occupied most of his time, especially after 1927, when he founded his own academy of painting, the Shinsui Gakujuku (Shinsui Academy); this was moved in 1930 and renamed Roho Gakujuku (Academy of the Clear Peak) and attracted many pupils, engendering another generation of 'Nihonga' artists specialising in 'bijinga'. Today Shinsui is recognized as the greatest 'bijinga' artist of the 20th century shin hanga style.

VG, minor flaws as shown