MWW Artwork of the Day (4/9/16) Utagawa (aka Ando) Hiroshige (Japanese, 1797-1858) One Hundred Famous Views of Edo #64: Horikiri Iris Garden (5th month of 1857) Color woodblock print, 36.1 x 23.6 cm. The Brooklyn Museum, New York
In the village of Horikiri in suburban Edo, gardeners grew a year-round variety of flowers and were particularly famous for the iris shown here, “hanashobu,” well suited to this swampy land. In this print Hiroshige has shown three, almost-life-size, detailed specimens of the nineteenth-century hanashobu hybrids and in the distance, sightseers from Edo are admiring the blossoms. In the 1870’s the cultivation of hanashobu had begun to spread rapidly in Europe and America and the developed into a booming export market for the gardeners of Horikiri. The Horikiri plantations began to wane in the 1920’s and eventually turned over to wartime food production. After the war, one of them was revived and is now a public park, particularly popular in May when the flowers are in bloom.
(from the Museum catalog)
Hiroshige’s work is the subject of several MWW exhibits/galleries: * Hokusai/Hiroshige - Fuji Views & Tokaido Stages * Hiroshige’s Edo - Vistas into the Lost World of Tokugawa Japan (coming Summer 2016) * Hiroshige’s Japan - More Vistas into a Lost World (coming Summer 2016) + Two installments of the MWW Non-Western Painting special Collection
MWW Artwork of the Day (4/2/16) Suzuki Harunobu (Japanese, 1725–1770) Plucking a Branch from a Neighbor’s Plum Tree (c. 1768) Polychrome woodblock print, 27.3 x 20 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Howard Mansfield Collection)
This print is an excellent example of Harunobu’s artistic taste —- reflecting nonsensuous tenderness and exquisiteness of figures. Casting off her sandals, a young woman has climbed onto her maid’s back to break off a branch of a plum tree growing over a tall wall with a tiled ridge. The two women are elegant and gentle despite their tomboyish behavior. The rigid and monotonous pattern of bricks in the fence is a foil for the graceful figures. Despite Harunobu’s depiction of these two young women as innocent, the expression “plucking a branch of plum blossoms” typically refers to a fashionably dressed female and even carries sexual overtones. The young woman wears a kimono (furisode) with hanging sleeves and a design of snow-clad bamboo. Her elaborately tied obi, or sash, has a scrolling floral pattern.
(from the MMA catalog)
More Harunobu prints can be seen in this MWW Special Collection: * MWW Non-Western Painting Gallery
‘Thirty Six Views of Mt. Fuji’ (2017) by Ishikawa Masumi (石川真澄), a contemporary Japanese ukiyo-e artist and illustrator who was born in Katsushika-ku, Tokyo in 1978.
Artist monmoncats had his design taken from RipNDip with no credit; no permission from the original artist to use their design
Worst part is, their thinking of launching their Fall Collection, including monmoncats originally design; this Thursday, and Monmoncats will be getting no credit or anything while RipNDip gets credit for something they stole.
I told Monmoncats on instagram if by chance RipNDip asked them for their permission in using their design;
Please guy’s, help spread the word, reblog to and help Monmoncats from having RipNDip use their design this Thursday. For more information please look at @Monmoncats instagram
