JP1847 Metropolitan Museum of Art
LCCN 2008660568 Library of Congress
M.81.91.2 Los Angeles County Museum of Art
— Honolulu Museum of Art
four sheets, one design, no original.
four sheets, one design, no original.
Hokusai supplied the design. That was the whole of his part in it. Everything that separates one of these sheets from another was done by other people, with knives, ink and paper.
The 彫師 — the block carvers — cut the drawing into wood: a keyblock for the outlines, and a further block for every colour. An apprentice could spend up to ten years before the fine work was trusted to him. The 摺師 — the printers — inked those blocks and pressed the paper against them by hand, judging pigment, moisture and pressure sheet by sheet. 見当, the registration marks cut into each block, held the paper in the same position through every colour pass, so that the blue landed exactly where the outline had. The 版元 — the publisher — commissioned the design, financed the whole undertaking and sold the result.
The Metropolitan Museum's Department of Scientific Research has concluded that the printers working for the publisher Eijudō — specifically their handling of the newly available Prussian blue — contributed materially to the success of the series. The blue that shifts under your hand at the top of this page is theirs.
For this print, the record does not carry the names of the carvers and the printers. Such names do survive elsewhere in the record of Japanese printmaking; here they were simply not written down, or not kept. That is a fact about the paperwork, not about the hands.
A sheet cost roughly what two helpings of noodles cost. Nobody treated one as valuable. Owners threw them out; earthquakes and fires took many more.
The keyblock carried the main outlines and took the most pressure, so it wore fastest. Each time a sliver of it gave way, a line vanished from every sheet pulled afterwards — and never came back.
Capucine Korenberg, a scientist at the British Museum working with its Department of Asia, published this in 2020. She identified five breaks in the keyblock and established the order in which they happened.
A print that still holds a line was made before a print that has lost it. The absence is the evidence.
To do it she assembled photographs of 111 original prints, from wherever they could be found:
Her chronology is not applied to the four sheets above. None of them is called early or late here. Placing them in that order would take evidence this station does not have.
Very late printings were made with two newly carved woodblocks: one for the light blue patterns in the sea, one for the yellow of the boats. They were poor replacements. Light blue areas that had been curved came out angular. Boats that should have been yellow were left white.
The original woodblocks are long lost. Their decay survives only inside the prints.
Four records for one design. Nothing here chooses between them, and nothing here averages them.
The very last printings have pink boats and dark brown clouds carried in a gradation. Korenberg examined four such prints and concluded that they are genuine originals, not reproductions.
So someone paid for a new block to be cut, for pink boats, at the very end — when the other blocks were already worn out, and when stopping would have been cheaper. Korenberg calls it a mystery.
She notes that the publisher Nishimuraya Yohachi, house name Eijudō, was recognised for very high standards, which makes the late carelessness surprising; and that a letter dated 1836 records economic difficulty in the mid-1830s. She offers two possibilities, both marked as hypotheses: that he sold the blocks on to a publisher with lower standards, or that he could no longer afford good ones.
Why carve a new block for pink boats at the very end?