<b>CHILDREN AT THE FAIR</b> / Fritz Capelari1915<b>SOLD</b></em>

Details

The publisher Watanabe Shozaburo started his enterprise reproducing well-known Ukiyo-e designs during the late Meiji Era. Seeing an opportunity to produce original work and revitalize the art of woodblock prints, he first hired the Austrian artist, Fritz Capelari. Delivering more than a dozen designs for Watanabe, Capelari is credited with being the first Shin Hanga artist and thus creating a blueprint for combining western aesthetic concerns with Japanese motifs that influenced both Watanabe and his future stable of artists.

Amid darkness, lanterns burn bright as two children cloaked in the light of the festival hold back the night with their own blooming red lights. Capelari depicts these two young girls with a charming sensitivity. Both subjects seem quite timid despite the festive atmosphere, with the older one facing the viewer with a sheepishly inquisitive expression. The artist has rendered these girls the way he might have encountered them—perhaps they are perplexed, never having seen a foreigner, particularly a Western one with features very different from their own. The diminutive size of this print, an anomaly in Capelari’s work, may be a reference to the size of the children as well as the delicate nature of the encounter.

Connoisseur's Note

Children at a Fair, 1916, is an incredibly rare work. The great Kanto earthquake of 1923 destroyed the original Watanabe print shop and studio along with the printing blocks for this design as well as the unsold inventory. Only impressions of this design sold before the earthquake and removed from Tokyo survived the earthquake and ensuing fires that consumed the city.