Kawase Hasui
| Hasui Kawase | |
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Signed portrait of Hasui Kawase, 1939
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| Native name | 川瀬巴水 Kawase Hasui |
| Born | 18 May 1883 |
| Died | 7 November 1957 (aged 74) |
| Nationality | Japanese |
| Movement | Shin-hanga |
Hasui Kawase (川瀬 巴水 Kawase Hasui?, May 18, 1883 – November 7, 1957) was a Japanese artist. He was one of the most prominent print designers of the shin-hanga ("new prints") movement.
From youth Hasui dreamed of an art career, but his parents had him take on the family rope and thread wholesaling business. Its bankruptcy when he was 26 freed him to pursue art. He approached Kiyokata Kaburagi to teach him, but Kaburagi instead encouraged him to study Western-style painting, which he did with Okada Saburōsuke for two years. Two years later he again applied as a student to Kaburagi, who this time accepted him.
After seeing an exhibition of Shinsui Itō's Eight Views of Lake Biwa Hasui approached Shinsui's publisher Shōzaburō Watanabe, who had Hasui make three experimental prints that Watanabe published in August 1918. The series Twelve Views of Tokyo, Eight Views of the Southeast, and the first Souvenirs of Travel of 16 prints followed in 1919, each issued two prints at a time.
Hasui's twelve-print A Collection of Scenes of Japan begun in 1922 went unfinished when the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake destroyed Watanabe's workshop, including the finished woodblocks for the yet-undistributed prints and Hasui's sketchbooks. Hasui travelled the Hokuriku, San'in, and San'yō regions later in 1923 and upon his return in February 1924 developed his sketches into his third Souvenirs of Travel series.
Kawase studied ukiyo-e and Japanese style painting at the studio of Kiyokata Kaburagi. He mainly concentrated on making watercolors of actors, everyday life and landscapes, many of them published as illustrations in books and magazines in the last few years of the Meiji period and early Taishō period.
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