Designer: Ohara Koson | Publisher: Numabe Mokuhan | Date: 2020

Paper size: 37cm by 19.5cm | Enlargement | Currency: $ / £ / €

Price: $ 550.00£ 440.00€ 510.00

Description: Ohara Koson (1877 – 1945) was a painter of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, part of the shin-hanga movement, was famous as a master of kachō-e (bird-and-flower) designs. It depicts a beautiful nature scene: early in the morning as the lotus flowers begin to open, a sparrow lands on the thin stalk, and the weight of the sparrow causes the night dew to fall.

This version is a reproduction published by Numabe Mokuhan, which is a new publishing venture started by Shinkichi Numabe, who is familiar to Mokuhankan fans and customers as one of our 'associate' printers - a freelance worker who both prints some of our own blocks as required, and supplies us with prints he has produced on request from other publishers (notably the Yoshida family and the Shobisha Company).

Numabe-san's comments on this work: "The charm of Koson's work lies not only in the beauty of the depiction but also in the expression of the wood grain and the expression of the colors that have been printed into the paper - unique to the woodblock print medium. In this work, the large lotus leaf and the grain of the background are particular characteristics of the original Koson version, and we searched for a woodblock that had a similar grain pattern to produce this work."

More information about Numabe's Koson reproduction project can be found on their Twitter feed and on YouTube.