Shotei (aka Hiroaki) (1871 - 1945 )
Born in Tokyo as Katsutaro Takahashi, Shotei (aka Hiroaki/ Komei) was in his mid-teens when he began to work in the design department of the Imperial Household Agency. He studied Nihonga, or Japanese-style painting, under his uncle Fuko Matsumoto, but also worked as an illustrator for periodicals and textbooks. Beginning in the early Taisho period, Shotei regularly collaborated with the prominent Shin Hanga publisher Shozaburo Watanabe. Shotei used a variety of signatures. Many of his large landscape prints and bijin-ga are signed 'Hiroaki,' while ‘Shotei’ appears on other works. Shotei was a productive shin-hanga artist, completing around five hundred designs by the time he was fifty. Unfortunately, many of Shotei's prints were destroyed by the fire that raged in the aftermath of the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923. Despite this tragedy, he continued to work as a printmaker until his death in 1945.
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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Shotei (aka Hiroaki)
The Foothills of Mt. Ashitaka, Autumn
JP-208255