Ohara Koson (小原古邨) / Shōson (祥邨) (artist 1877 – 1945)
Crow on Snowy Bough
ca 1911 – 1915
7.5 in x 14.875 in (Overall dimensions) Japanese woodblock print
Signed: Koson (古邨)
Seal: Koson
The National Museum of Asian Art - edition without signature
Rijksmuseum
Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University - a different printing with no signature or artist's seal in the lower left
Smart Museum of Art, the University of Chicago The publisher is probably Daikokuya (Matsuki Heikichi). That is the way it is often attributed even though there is no publisher's seal.
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There are a number of smaller print editions of this image without signatures. Some of these prints have the same orange background/sky as in this print, while others have a gray or blue ground.
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Illustrated:
1) in color in 'Seven Ways of Looking at Religion' by Benjamin Schewel.
2) in color in "Zeshin's 'Crows in flight at sunrise': The anatomy of a print" by Robert Schaap in Andon 95, December, 2013, fig. 6, p. 35. Schaap noted on page 38: "...Ohara Koson (1877 -1945), who specialised in kachoga (flower-and-bird pictures), designed over 30 prints and paintings showing crows..."
3) by a small black and white illustration in Shin-Hanga: New Prints in Modern Japan by Kendall H. Brown and Hollis Goodall-Cristante, Los Angeles County Museum of Art with the University of Washington Press, 1996, figure 64, page 55. Kendall Brown wrote: "Crow on a Snowy Branch... bears the signature and seal of Koson and likely dates from about 1911 to 1915. The subject reminiscent of a famous painting by Yosa Buson (1716-83), reverses the composition of another Shōson print in which a crow, with beak closed, perches on a snowy branch against an orange background. While the composition recalls some of Hiroshighe's bolder kachō-e, the rough effects of the tree branch seem indebted to Gekkō's work and are a mark of Shōson's early prints. New, however, are technical effects such as using the wood grain to suggest a snowy night sky and the mixing of gllue with ink on the crow's lower feathers to create their iridescence."
A large color detail of this print, printed mostly in black and gray, on the cover of this catalog.
4) in color in Crows, Cranes and Camellias: the Natural World of Ohara Koson 1877-1945 by Amy Reigle Newland, Jan Perrée and Robert Schaap, Hotei Publishing, 2001, page 72, K5.7. Three different editions are shown: one with a gray background; one with an orange background; and one with a blue background.
Daikokuya Heikichi (大黒屋平吉) (publisher)
kachō-e (bird and flower picture - 花鳥絵) (genre)
modern prints (shin hanga - 新版画) (genre)