Crow on a Snowy Branch · Ohara Koson · Japanese Woodblock Print

Crow on a Snowy Branch - a Japanese colour woodblock print by Ohara Koson, master of the bird-and-flower print.

"Crow on a Snowy Branch", 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.

Koson's crows are among his most sought-after designs: a single black bird against snow or a pale sky, drawn with the economy of a brush painting.

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.

Prepared from a high-resolution scan of an original woodblock impression, keeping the soft colour gradations and the texture of the paper. 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.