Itō Takashi (伊藤孝之) (artist 1894 – 1982)
Odai Ferry (小台の渡し) in Tokyo
11/1922
15.25 in x 10.25 in (Overall dimensions) Japanese color woodblock print
Signed: Takashi
Publisher seal in lower right: Watanabe
Museum of Fine Arts. Boston - an original 1922 edition
Östasiatiska Museet, Stockholm
Honolulu Museum of Art
Syracuse University This is one of the very first prints ever produced by Itō Takashi (伊藤貴史 - also written as 伊藤教之). In fact, in a catalog of his works it is the second entry.
Helen Merritt wrote in Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints: The Early Years (pp. 59-60): "Meanwhile Watanabe was continually working with new artists with whom he hoped to develop long-term collaborations. One of these was Yoshida Hiroshi, who came in 1920 for help in carving and printing. Watanabe also made a few landscape prints with Yanagihara Fūkyo and with other students of Kaburagi Kiyokata, including Kitagawa Kazuo and Furuya Taiken. In 1922 he began a collaboration with Itō Takashi (born 1894) that would flourish into the 1930s." [The bold print is our choice.]
According to Kendall H. Brown in Shin-Hanga: New Prints in Modern Japan (p. 75) "...produced roughly fifty landscape prints for Watanabe in the decade after 1922."
This is one of only three prints produced by Itō Takashi in Watanabe's workshop before it was destroyed in the great earthquake of 1923.
Watanabe Mokuhan Bujitsu Gahō (渡邊木版美術画舗) (publisher)
landscape prints (fūkeiga 風景画) (genre)
modern prints (shin hanga - 新版画) (genre)