Hasui 巴水: Mount Fuji on a Moonlit Night, Kawai Bridge (SOLD)

Artist: Kawase Hasui 川瀬巴水
Title: Mount Fuji on a Moonlit Night, Kawai Bridge  Date: 1947

Series: Selection of Views of the Tokaido

Picture-perfect evening scene of large conifers leaning almost protectively towards Mount Fuji, which rises with stately perfection in the distance. A wooden bridge is shown spanning the foreground, a man with a horse crossing towards the quiet village. As we often see in evening scenes, there are a few windows that beckon with bright glowing lights (here unfaded), giving warmth to the cool, aizuri blue of the moonlit night. When searching for this bridge today, there no longer seems to be a Kawai Bridge in this region, although there are postcards from around 1915 that show a very similar scene in the Chubu region of Japan with this small bridge named Kawaibashi. It is often the case that when looking for the exact places that Hasui chose to depict, that the names have changed and the location can no longer be easily found. This is more common when Hasui left the environs of Tokyo, as he may have titled places like small shrines using a more local, vernacular name; some small landmarks may also just have disappeared in the ensuing century. We can see Hasui’s original sketch of the scene in the 2013 Folk Museum of Ota City catalog, page 230. The sketch is dated Showa 8 (1933), 2nd month, so we can see that Hasui circled back to a place he had visited before the war. There are more than 70 sketchbooks that were donated to the museum by heirs of the artist, and the sketches are fascinating to study.   With the round postwar Watanabe seal in red, lower right, consistent with a first edition.

Condition: Excellent impression, color and condition.
Dimensions: ôban 39.3 x 26.4 cm
Publisher: Watanabe Shôzaburô
Literature: Hotei #561. Hisao Shimizu, Hasui Kawase, Folk Museum of Ota City, 2013, p. 230, no. 382 (illustrated next to artist's sketchbook drawing of the design). See Art Institute of Chicago, LACMA, National Museum of Asian Art.  Seal: Kawase  Signature: Hasui with his seal

SKU: HAS646