Word: harunobu
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...paper over two identical wood blocks, each one inked in a different color. By the 1740s several blocks were being used for a single picture, and luxurious calendars featuring polychrome prints became popular as New Year's gifts among smart Edo residents. King of the calendar prints was Suzuki Harunobu, whose Beauty Taking the Air by a River (1765-66), of a slender young woman in a subtle rose kimono, is one of the best among his dozens in the show...
These, like the doings of sumo wrestlers and high-class prostitutes, gave a rich subject matter to 18th century graphic artists like Suzuki Harunobu, Kitagawa Utamaro and the theater caricaturist Toshusai Sharaku, whose image of the actor Otani Oniji III playing a samurai's manservant, all red-rimmed eyes and stylish snarl, is a deliciously succinct expression of fictive bloody-mindedness. Through the medium of prints, the range of things that could be depicted widened to take in all Japan. Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji and Ando Hiroshige's Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido...
...incised in turn so that each could be used to print a single color. In the early 18th century, print-makers were largely limited to various vegetable-based inks of red and yellow. By the 1740s, greens, blues and grays had been added to the spectrum. The artist Suzuki Harunobu is credited with developing the first nishiki-e, or full-color picture-named for nishiki-e, a richly embroidered brocade...
...collection consists in part of a representative group of primitives, some very fine examples by Harunobu, and is unusually strong in actor prints by such masters as Shunsho, Buncho, and Shungei. There are also about a dozen portraits by Shiriau, as well as a large group of Surimono, (small prints for special occasions) by Hokusai, Hiroshige, Toyokuni, Utamaro, and others...
...Moronobu, the first great master in the history of Japanese Prints, Klyonobu, Masanobu, the greatest of his time, whose works are now very scarce, Klyomitsu and Toyonobu, the most brilliant of the designers of the later part of the Primitive Period, will be shown, and also prints by Harunobu and Shunsho, who took advantage of the processes developed by Harunobu to produce his great actor prints...