The Great Gate at Shiba

Description

Kawase Hasui shows the Shiba Gate here, with a person cycling through it, covered for a very short moment against the surrounding rain. The Great Gate at Shiba was one of the entrance gates to Zojo-ji temple in Tokyo. Hasui's prints tend to show only glimpses of modernity, if at all. Here the wires and the cyclist are present. About a decade after the first edition of this design modernity would encroach further upon the scene, and the wooden gate would be replaced with a concrete one. This gate has survived the intervening decades, however, and remains standing today. This Kawase Hasui print is part of a group of designs he first made around 1930 for the publishing partnership Sakai-Kawaguchi. The woodblocks were destroyed during the war, and after the war the rights to the designs were transferred to the publisher Shobisha. With the involvement of Kawase Hasui, new woodblocks were carved for the designs in the 1950s, and Shobisha has published them from the 1950s onward to the present day. Listing the date of the first edition in the 1950s might be more accurate, but within the woodblock print community and literature the years of the initial designs are commonly used.