Two Herons in the Rain · Ohara Koson · Japanese Woodblock Print

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

"Two Herons in the Rain", 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.

Reproduced from a high-resolution scan of an original impression in the Rijksmuseum, printed whole to the edge of the sheet with Koson's signature and seals. Made to order on heavyweight cotton-fibre archival paper and sold at a single size, mounted with an equal border all round and framed in-house.