Ohara Koson Prints

About Ohara Koson

Ohara Koson was born in Kanazawa in 1877 and studied painting under Suzuki Kason, taking his art name, Koson, in honour of his teacher. Around 1900 he was teaching at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, where he met the American scholar Ernest Fenollosa, then curator of Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, who encouraged him to design woodblock prints for the Western market. Almost all of his roughly five hundred print designs are kachō-e, bird-and-flower pictures: crows on snowy branches, egrets in rain, sparrows, swallows, pheasants, owls against a moon, each bird rendered with a brush-painter's economy on a plain ground. His early prints were published by Akiyama Buemon and Matsuki Heikichi under the name Koson; from about 1926 he worked with Watanabe Shōzaburō, the publisher who created the shin-hanga movement's revival of traditional woodblock printing, and signed those prints Shōson, and he used Hōson for prints issued by Kawaguchi. He continued designing until at least 1935 and died in Tokyo in 1945. Most of his output was exported, which is why he is better known in the United States and Europe than in Japan. The prints are small, quiet and perfectly balanced, and they hang as calmly as they were made.