print
- Museum number
- 1987,0316,0.606
- Description
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Colour woodblock print. Spectators in arena of aquarium on beach at Mitohama on Izu Peninsula, looking across Suruga Bay towards Mt Fuji; two fish in foreground. Signed and sealed.
- Production date
- 1954
- Dimensions
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Height: 33.40 centimetres
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Width: 26.50 centimetres
- $Inscriptions
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- Curator's comments
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Smith 1994
Senpan was already fifty-seven by the end of the Pacific War and the oldest of the established 'Sosaku Hanga' artists. By temperament and age he was disinclined to change his style, expanding gladly instead into the gradually larger formats which were becoming popular among foreign connoisseurs. He is quoted in Statler, Oliver, 'Modern Japanese Prints: An Art Reborn', Turtle, Rutland, Vermont, and Tokyo, 1956, p.47, as saying '. . . creative prints were small and amateurish in those days (ie 1927). I was always sure that we had to make them bigger and better'. This scene typifies much of that gritty, simplified, yet colourful manner which the pre-war 'Sosaku Hanga' artists had sought after, but on a larger and more optimistic scale. The print is executed with simple poster colours on 'torinoko' paper, which were Senpan's normal materials. Mitohama is a beach on the sea near to the town of Numazu in Shizuoka Prefecture, looking across the bay towards Mount Fuji in the distance. The Aquarium is still a tourist attraction there.
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Clark 2001
Spectators in the arena of the aquarium on the beach at Mitohama on the Izu Peninsula look across Suruga Bay towards Mt Fuji. Even the two fish in the foreground seem to be pointing in that direction. The schematized, genial style was characteristic of Maekawa since his earliest prints, first exhibited with the Nihon Sosaku Hanga Kyokai (Japan Creative Print Association) from 1919 (member from 1924), subsequently as a founding member of the Nihon Hanga Kyokai (Japan Print Association) from 1931. It is significant that he was also working as a prominent cartoon ('manga') artist until at least 1953. Maekawa's subject-matter was always democratically grounded in the lives of ordinary people, be they tourists at an aquarium, city-dwellers at the miniature golf, country folk performing festival dances, or - and this was his perennial favourite - naked humanity in hot-spring resorts throughout Japan. The formats of his prints may have grown generally larger after the war, but their engaging idiom did not really change.
Literature:
Smith, Lawrence. 'Modern Japanese Prints, 1912-1989'. London, British Museum Press, 1994, no. 82.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
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Exhibited:
2001, 11 May-29 Jul, BM Japanese Galleries, '100 Views of Mount Fuji'
2023-2024 November-April, BM, Mitsubishi Corporation Japanese Galleries
- Acquisition date
- 1987
- Department
- Asia
- Registration number
- 1987,0316,0.606