Description

Hasui Kawase May 18, 1883 - November 7, 1957 was a Japanese artist that took up ukiyo-e printing as it disappeared as a commercial printing form and instead became an art for its own sake, so to say.
In Hokusai and Hiroshige´s time, first half of the 1800s, ukiyo-e prints were cheap - around the price of a bowl of soup -and filled the market which would later develop in postcards and magazines.
Hasui designed traditional prints in a western style, mostly landscapes, often with special lighting effects like evening og night and special weather conditions- he was fond of showing temples and shrines in snow.
He worked closely with a single publisher - Shozaburo Watanabe - throughout his life. The Great Kanto earthquake in 1923 destroyed Watanabe´s workshop, including the finished woodblocks for the yet-undistributed prints and Hasui´s sketchbooks. He lost 188 sketchbooks in which he had drawn landscapes and other subjects