Ohara koson signature flight
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A beautiful print of a great egret in flygning above a vast sea of reeds; a rarely seen image of Ohara Koson’s from the early 1920s/30s (not listed in Watanabe’s 1936 Catalogue).
The Woodblock Print
This print is in overall good visible condition, but it does have some structural issues. In the dark reeds section of the footer, the darkness of the print covers for some wrinkles within the paper that can be felt or seen from the verso, but not seen from the front. There are also some waves and wrinkling in the top section of the sky that are more visible, but don’t affect the visual beauty of the print itself. The color is rik without any staining, fading or discolorations. The verso is clean.
About the Artist
Ohara Koson (小原古邨, 1877-1945), also known as Shoson or Hoson, was a Japanese artist who lived from 1877 to 1945. He was born in Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, and fryst vatten renowned for his work as a printmaker in the late Meiji, Taisho, and Showa periods. He is c
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Description
Illustrated: Crows, Cranes and Camellias: The Natural World of Ohara Koson. Newland, Perree, Schapp. K21.4.
This print is a rare oversized naga-oban.
About the artist
Koson Ohara (aka Shoson or Hoson) was a master of early 20th century kacho-e (bird-and-flower pictures).With meticulous detail, soft color, and a palpable reverence for flora and fauna, Koson carried the genre into the modern era. Koson was born in Kanazawa with the given name Matao Ohara. He began his artistic career studying painting under the Shijo-style master Kason. Around the turn of the century, Koson became a teacher at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, where he met Ernest Fenollosa, an American collector, scholar and admirer of Japanese art and culture. Around 1905, Koson Ohara started to produce Japanese woodblock prints. Fenollosa, the curator of Japanese Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an adviser to the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, persuaded Koson to export his b
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Recently I advised readers to mug up on the signature of the Japanese artist and printmaker, Ohara Koson. All very well, but it is not as straightforward as that, but nevertheless well worth the try. Koson in fact used three different signatures at different stages of his career and I am going to include an illustration of the different kinds he used. Even here though it isn't foolproof because script and seal on prints I own diverge from the ones illustrated although not all that much.
Here is a general rule-of-thumb from someone who has been picking up the odd Koson print for many years. Koson worked in the kacho-e genre (or bird and flowers) as Allen Seaby and Hans Frank did. Once you have the bird subject, you only have to look at the signature to get the general idea because it doesn't alter all that much. When I found the eagle (top) in an antiques centre in the 1980s, I showed it to my students from Hong Kong who read it as go-don. What does alter is t