“Travelling is my favourite hobby… and this hobby is not just something that I casually speak of, since sketching is my goal…”

— the artist-poet with the spirit of a traveller — Kawase Hasui

Kawase Hasui (1883-1957) is among the most important Japanese landscape artists of the 20th century. While modern in approach and aesthetic, Hasui’s woodblock prints exude a timelessness in spirit that still resonates with today’s audiences.

From poetic renditions of dusk and moonlight, snow blizzards to sudden rainfall, dappled sunlight to the embrace of shadows, Hasui delights in capturing the splendour of a season or the fleeting beauty of a moment. Characterized by a serenity of mood and flawless composition, his prints guide the viewer through Japan with an enduring intimacy and sensibility.

A towering figure in Japan’s Shin Hanga (‘New Print’) tradition, Hasui is well known for his love of travel, a pastime that for him meant much more than mere tourism. As Hasui himself once wrote: “…Travelling is my favourite hobby… and this hobby is not just something that I casually speak of, since sketching is my goal…” He was particular about where he would open his sketchbook, depicting famous spots but rarely choosing the most obvious or famous angles.

Hasui treated his country’s great temples and shrines in the same independent spirit, avoiding the standard frontal view and focusing on a small section—often one without any distinguishing features. Few of his prints include people, and when they do, they typically feature a solitary figure or a pair, often depicted from behind or in profile. These figures are usually positioned at the edges or in the background of the composition, their isolation evoking a sense of poignancy and adding psychological depth to the scene.

In terms of pure landscape, Hasui avoided picturesque views that had become famous, preferring to savour the quieter nuances of places, not mirroring them with banal precision but capturing their changing, elusive moods. He travelled to feel, not just to see, and in so doing conjured an emotional response and encouraged a desire to travel freely—to experience the loneliness of a deserted mountain path or a coastline characterized by the strange roots of pine trees whose dappled reflections are enhanced by a clear moon.

Hasui was a huge talent and enjoyed commercial success in Japan and overseas—the late Steve Jobs was an early admirer and an avid collector.  More than 600 woodblock prints were designed in only four decades, some published in editions of no more than 2,000, far fewer than some of the great landscape prints of the nineteenth century such as Hokusai’s ‘Great Wave’.

The prints offered in this auction offer a mere glimpse into the artist’s mastery of landscape, from rare pre-earthquake printings to post-WWII compositions. The majority originates from private collections with some bearing the earliest copyright seals of his long-term publisher, Watanabe Shozaburo. A few designs are even earlier and rarer, dating from before the great earthquake that devastated Tokyo and Yokohama in 1923, while there are also rare first editions—seldom offered at auction—produced jointly by the Tokyo publishers Sakai and Kawaguchi, exemplified by the elegant wintry highlights from the Twinight Collection, which all belong to an American private collector.

Most major museum collections of Hasui’s prints are in the United States, where his work first gained  international acclaim in the 1920s—but as is clearly apparent from the regular and crowded exhibitions in Japan, along with  the impressive results of our recent auctions, the artist’s oeuvre is now experiencing a resurgence in popularity both at home and abroad.  Hasui is finally receiving the recognition he deserves, on par with his traditional counterparts such as Hokusai, Hiroshige, and Harunobu.