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- Other shin hanga landscape artists who deserve mention include Eisho Narazaki or Fuyo (1864-1936), Kokan Bannai (b. 1900), Ito Yuhan (active 1930s), Taiken Furuya (active 1930s) and Oda Kazuma (1882-1936), who was a sosaku hanga artist working in the shin hanga realist style and who did do some prints for Watanabe.
One of the first shin hanga landscape artists to have success, especially in the export market, was Shotei (Hiroaki) Takashi (1871-1943). He produced a prolific number of traditional woodblock prints in a wide variety of sizes from postcard size and long, narrow prints to the full size oban format. He was the first artist encouraged by Watanabe in 1907 to produce original prints. It is said between 1907 and 1923 he created nearly five hundred prints for Watanabe. He studied the techniques of the ukiyo-e masters. At first he succeeded in producing idyllic tourist landscapes and later in the 1920s made some extremely fine landscapes often with rain or snow. He also produced some interesting bijin-e prints.
Bijin-e (Pictures of Beauties)
On the subject of portraits of women, the shin hanga artists excelled and produced prints with a tremendous visual appeal. They harmonized the two dimensional features of the classic beauties of ukiyo-e with Western- style concepts of space, light and volume. The result was a feeling of naturalism in the round or three dimensionality. The dark iron-wire outlines of the ukiyo-e faces gave way to more natural faces with soft, modulated colour lines. The women of shin hanga prints seemed more refined, dignified and respectable than their ukiyo-e counterparts. The shin hanga beauties were usually devoted to bathing or applying makeup, and show slight signs of erotism. The treatment of the shiny cascading hair, in particular, was quite exquisite.
There were a few late ukiyo-e artists, Toshikata Mizuno (1866-1908), Chikanobu Toyohara (1838-1912), Shoun Yamamoto (1870-1963), Toshimine Tsutsui (n.d.), Kiyokata Kaburagi (1878-1972), Keishu Takeuchi (1861-1943), Terukata Ikeda (1883-1921), and Shoen Ikeda (1888-1917) who could be considered precursors to shin hanga bijin-e prints, as they produced more naturalistic and updated images of beauties in the late 19th and early 20th century than earlier ukiyo-e artists.
The greatest of the shin hanga artists to make bijin-e was Goyo Hashiguchi (1880-1921). Early in his career, he trained as a Western-style painter and won awards for his skillful renditions. He painted in a style similar to the French Academicians of the early 20th century. As was men�tioned earlier, Watanabe persuaded Goyo to convert a painting into a print in 1913. However, Goyo became obsessed with high standards and with
26 AGGV COLLECTS/SHIN HANGA
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