Two Swallows Diving · Ohara Koson · Japanese Woodblock Print

Two Swallows Diving - a Japanese colour woodblock print by Ohara Koson, master of the bird-and-flower print.

"Two Swallows Diving", 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 small birds are drawn among the blossom, snow and branches of the Japanese seasons, each print a single quiet moment.

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. Printed to order on cotton-fibre archival paper at one size, with a wide mount cut so the border is even on all four sides, and framed by hand in our own workshop.