A beautiful cluster of three different iris, in blue, purple and white, by Hodo Nishimura, published circa 1938.
The Woodblock Print
This oban-size woodblock print is in excellent condition. Strong, gorgeous colors, bokashi shading, and even some embossing within the petals. Clean verso, good margins with only very minor toning at the edges of the margins.
About the Artist
There is little biographical data available about the Japanese printmaker Hodo Nishimura (西村蒲堂). It is not currently know when or where he was born and when he died away. He is generally believed to have been an in-house artist for the publisher Takemura Hideo in Yokahama from around 1930 until the business shut down in 1941. He is known to have signed his watercolors and some of his woodcuts as “Saito Hodo” or “H. Saito”.
The majority of the work attributed to him was created in the late 1930s using traditional woodblock technique. His work was collected by the famous Japanese print collector Robert Muller.
