In the 70s and 80s I was buying prints by such artists as Hiroshige, Hokusai, and Utamaro in the UK and in France and selling them in Japan. In Japan, I was buying prints by Yoshitoshi and Kuniyoshi. At that time those artists were not so highly valued by Japanese collectors.   I travelled to Paris every ten days or so and on almost every trip I was able to find something good. A lot of prints had been exported to France in the 19th century. Japanese art and culture enjoyed great influence in France at that time, the importance of ukiyo-e for the French impressionists is well known. Now it is difficult to find good quality prints in France and the prices fetched in auctions are often prohibitive.     At the time of my early trips to Japan in the 70s, there were not so many European or American visitors to Tokyo, visitor numbers to Japan were in the low 100,000s. Now visitor numbers are approaching 25 million per annum. My first experience of central Tokyo was a revelation – a real shock of the new! Tokyo’s highrise office blocks, its modern and efficient transport system, the bullet train all made London feel quite parochial. Because I had been studying ukiyo-e, Kyoto seemed much more familiar to me – if you squinted it was like being in a Hiroshige landscape.   My days were tiring ones of walking around shops in both cities. Prints could turn up anywhere. Outside of the cities it was not unusual for me to be followed by a gaggle of children for whom I was clearly a source of curiosity and general amusement.   I attended various auctions in Japan and often I was the only foreign dealer. The auctions were smaller then…

Looking back on 50 years of dealing in Japanese prints, paintings and books I have much to be grateful for. From the first ukiyo-e print that I bought in 1968 to now when I have bought and sold many tens of thousands of prints. In researching specific prints I have built up my kno wledge of the artists and the artisans involved in print production. I continue to learn about the history, culture, and society that all gave rise and shaped what we know as ukiyo-e. Handling and knowing this art of 17th to 19th century Japan has been, and continues to be, a great pleasure and privilege for me.     I was fortunate that when I began as a dealer, it was at a time when prints were readily available and there was a wave of interest in Japanese art. I came to dealing after working as a professional photographer for a few years in London in the ‘swinging 60s’. I started buying and selling prints – initially book plates, Hogarth prints, maps and caricatures, I had a stall in an antiques market and was beginning to almost make a living. In 1968, by chance, I went into a shop just off Charing Cross Road that sold Japanese antiquities. On the wall was a print of a samurai by Kuniyoshi. I was familiar with engravings and etchings but I had never seen a printing technique like that. I was so excited by the print that I paid £40 for it – an extravagant price at that time! I put it on my stall in the Antique Centre near Selfridges. It took me three years to sell it and I made a big loss. This was the beginning of my education as a Japanese print dealer. I am often…

    Given names: Bunkado; Bunkadô; Fujiwara; Jitokusai; Jitokusō; Magoemon; “Uji” Nishikawa; Nishikawa Nishikawa Sukebê /Sukebê; Nishikawa Sukenobu; Saiō; Sukenobu; Uemon; Ukyô; Ukyō; Yûsuke   Sukenobu was “The most accomplished and influential Ukiyo-e painter in Kyoto during the first half of the eighteenth century” [1]. He was born and died in Kyoto, the centre of the Imperial Court, home of the classical arts and aristocratic custom. It is this tradition that permeates Sukenobu’s prolific work. Contemporaries studied his books and prized his paintings of single figures and groups of females. He “influenced Masanobu directly, Harunobu profoundly and almost all subsequent ukiyo-e artists indirectly” [2]. In the years in which the ukiyo-e style was emerging from the publishing district of Edo, Sukenobu was training from a young age in the painting styles of Kano school artist Kano Eino and Tosa school artist Tosa Mitsusuke, (from whom he may have derived the Suke- in his name). Whilst ukiyo-e prospered and grew in Edo, it also developed in the Kamigata area (Osaka and Kyoto) which produced its own style and masters. Of the Kamigata artists Sukenobu led the genre – he produced thousands of illustrations and would remain amongst the most prolific ukiyo-e artists of the entire Edo period.   His images were almost exclusively in monochrome. Sukenobu produced no single-sheet prints. The beginning of ukiyo-e style and Sukenobu’s prodigious output took place in the Genroku era, 1688-1704, a period of great wealth amongst the merchant classes of Osaka, Kyoto and Edo. These cities expanded and saw the emergence and flowering of an urban popular culture: “the later part of the Genroku era around 1700… the townspeople as a class had reached a high degree of affluence and culture, and the artistic impulse in Japan in general was more vital and widely diffused,…

    Approximately 70% of Japan’s landscape is mountainous. In the past when travel into the mountains was difficult there was a large demand and great curiosity by the public to see those remote snow covered landscapes. Publishers and leading artists like Hiroshige and Hokusai responded to that demand by ensuring that every landscape set had at least one snow scene and, often, as in the 100 Views of Edo set, there were as many as seven.   Winter landscapes, because of their minimalist nature appeal to a modern aesthetic and are probably the most popular and expensive landscape prints to collect now. They most often show travellers in a snowy pass but we can also enjoy scenes of Edo (Tokyo) under deep snow. Tokyo’s location on the coast of the Pacific Ocean affords the city mild winters with cool spells. Snowfall does occur annually but it is sporadic and it seldom stays. Perhaps there were heavier falls one or two hundred years ago but more likely artists used snow imagery as a way to both emphasise the season and to transform both landscape and cityscape.   In ukiyo-e a number of techniques were used to suggest snow: areas of image were left blank or block cutters and printers created texture on the paper using gauffrage (blind-printing) in which the block is printed without pigment. This convincingly conveyed snow and is primarily found on prints of the Harunobu period and surimono both of which were printed using thick hosho which is ideal for blind-printing.   White pigment was also used: gofun which was prepared from powdered clam shells [calcium carbonate] or shiro prepared from white lead carbonate. Snowflakes could be cut into the blocks and printed; or gofun or shiro could be splashed from a brush onto the paper, or…

    In the present update is a large painting of one hundred monkeys by Mori Sosen (1747-1824). His life is not well documented but he is known to have studied under the Kano artist Yamamoto Joshunsai (? – 1781) before being drawn into Maruyama Okyo’s (1733-1795) artist circle and his style is more Shijo than anything else. His animal paintings were evidently highly valued by Okyo. He was an immediate favourite with eastern collectors because of his monkey paintings and became known for this subject, although he was more versatile than literature implies and highly accomplished at drawing other animals. But his images of monkeys take precedence and he is considered the pre-eminent painter, east or west, on this subject. He is said to have lived in the woods for three years eating fruit and nuts to study the monkeys and other animals at close quarters. (Even if this is apocryphal it underlines the appreciation of his commitment to understanding the monkey.)   This tour de force of one hundred Japanese macaque monkeys shows every conceivable pursuit. They are the most northern-living monkey and can survive extreme cold. There are many Sosen monkey paintings but few, as here, are genuine.