Two Egrets in Flight · Ohara Koson · Japanese Woodblock Print

Two Egrets in Flight - a Japanese colour woodblock print by Ohara Koson, master of the bird-and-flower print.

"Two Egrets in Flight", a colour woodblock print by Ohara Koson, c. 1900, from the collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, printed in the tall narrow format Koson used for many of his single-bird designs.

Herons and egrets were one of Koson's favourite subjects, standing in rain or reeds or flying past the moon, their white plumage left as bare paper against soft grey grounds.

Ohara Koson (1877-1945) was the leading designer of kacho-e, the Japanese "bird-and-flower" print, in the first half of the twentieth century. Trained as a painter, he designed hundreds of prints of birds in snow, rain and moonlight, many of them made for collectors in Europe and America. From 1926 he worked with the Tokyo publisher Watanabe Shozaburo, leader of the shin-hanga movement, signing his prints Shoson.

Each print is a Japanese colour woodblock: the design was cut into a separate block of cherry wood for every colour and printed by hand with water-based pigments on mulberry paper, the printer wiping the block to give the soft graded skies and falling snow that are Koson's signature.

Taken from a high-resolution scan of an original print, with the colours left as the printer laid them and nothing repainted. Made to order on cotton-fibre archival paper at the one size the plate is cut to, with the mount and frame cut and finished by hand here.