Designer: Nishikawa Sukenobu | Carver: David Bull | Printer: Rei
Paper size: 23.5cm by 16.5cm | Enlargement | Shipping Code: [M]
Price: $ 80.00£ 64.75€ 73.75
[Currently reprinting]
Description: This is a design Nishikawa Sukenobu, who rnlived and worked in Kyoto. In his time therernwas a thriving book publishing industry in that part of Japan; thernbook from which this picture is taken ('Ehon Chiyomigusa'), wasrnpublished in Osaka in 1740.
He designed this print about two decades beforernthe full-colour nishiki-e technique was developed - thernbook was printed in black only. All the colours you see in thisrnprint are not the work of Sukenobu, but were conceived by Dave. Thisrnactually is not such a 'terrible' thing to do as it might sound; if arnmodern western printmaker made a new edition of a Rembrandt etchingrnwith new colours added, it might not be accepted toornwell by the art community, but the Japanese traditional way ofrnprintmaking delegated a tremendous amount of responsibility to therncarver and printer, and we know that quite often the designer's onlyrninput was the original brush sketch - the rest of the work, even suchrncreative jobs such as devising attractive colour schemes, was done byrnthe shokunin, who were quite capable of it ... when they had reason to!
rnNote (1): This print was originally published by David in his Surimono Albums series. He made approximately 200 copies of each of those prints, and distributed them only in album form, never as single prints. It is his idea that after the 200 album sets of any particular album have been sold, the blocks (still in absolutely perfect condition) could then be used to produce prints to be added to the Mokuhankan catalogue, with the printing being done by hired craftsmen working under his direction. The first Surimono Album is now out-of-print, and this is one of the designs from it.rn