Baldridge, Cyrus LeRoy (1889 - 1977 )
Cyrus Leroy Baldridge was an illustrator, artist, author and adventurer. At the age of 10, he became the youngest student at Frank Holme’s Chicago School of Illustration. In 1907, he was accepted to University of Chicago, where he continued his art education and graduated in 1911. Following graduation Baldridge worked as an illustrator and war correspondent. He settled in upstate New York around 1920, where worked as an illustrator and writer. Yet, his life was never short on adventure. Baldridge and his wife traveled the world – from Africa to India, and to Japan in the 1920s. Though Japanese artwork had a profound influence on his style as an illustrator, Baldridge also began to explore the woodblock print medium. During his time in Japan, he met the famed Shin Hanga print publisher Watanabe Shozaburo in Tokyo. Baldridge produced a number of woodblock prints for Watanabe during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1952, he and his wife retired to Santa Fe, where he fed his taste for adventure hiking the mountains of New Mexico.
Shin Hanga | Pre-WWII Japanese Prints
By the beginning of the 20th century the social fabric of Japan was radically altered and ukiyo-e was falling fast into oblivion. Surprisingly, it was under the stimulus of the Western art world that the spirit of ukiyo-e was reborn through the Shin Hanga or “new print” movement. The discovery of the powerful impact of ukiyo-e print masters on the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists inspired a new generation of Japanese print artists who revived distinctly Japanese subject matter through modern eyes. International excitement for ukiyo-e paved the way for these artists to create woodblock prints with the same dignity, perfection and genius as the masters of the Edo period. As artists such as Goyo, Kotondo and Shinsui revived bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful women) and Hasui and Yoshida reinterpreted the landscape of Japan, Shin Hanga reasserted the principal genres of ukiyo-e with a renewed vigor. Browse our collection of Shin Hanga and other pre-war Japanese artworks today.
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