Kawase Hasui

Kawase Hasui (1883 – 1957) is one of the most famous Japanese woodblock artists and perhaps the foremost representative of the Shin-Hanga movement. As such, he worked in the traditional setting of Japanese printmakers, in collaboration with a publisher, carver and printer and did not carve and print the works himself. Kawase Hasui strongly focused on designs depicting landscapes and famous places and payed much less attention to other typical Shin-Hanga themes, such as beautiful women or birds and flowers. Within the themes of landscapes and famous places, he showed repeated mastery of night, rain and snow scenes, but covered a wide variety of other scenes in his enormous body of work of more then 600 prints. He is widely regarded as one of the most important Japanese landscape artists.