Details

Charles W. Bartlett’s Kobe captures the electric atmosphere of a Japanese summer festival, suffused with rain, lanternlight, and the subtle choreography of umbrellas. The composition pulses with movement—women in patterned yukata step carefully along the rain-slicked street, parasols unfurling like blossoms, while overhead, vertical banners and telegraph poles create a rhythmic, almost musical counterpoint to the crowd below.

In the distance, the faint silhouette of a torii gate anchors the scene in the sacred, even as the foreground teems with modern energy. Street lamps glow like fireflies, and colorful paper lanterns cast their soft reflections across the wet earth. Rain streaks the entire composition with vertical lines—part weather, part abstraction—melding figures, fabric, and architecture into a unified, immersive field of color and motion.

Bartlett’s Western training is evident in the painterly depth and expressive use of color, yet the sensibility remains rooted in shin-hanga aesthetics: everyday life elevated to lyrical poetry.

Connoisseur's Note

Kobe stands as one of Bartlett’s most iconic woodblocks—a remarkable synthesis of East and West, of urban spectacle and intimate observation. Created during his landmark collaboration with Watanabe Shōzaburō in 1916, this work reveals a Japan not of temples and rustic hillsides, but of modernity and momentum—alive with the pageantry of the present.

Bartlett, already in his fifties when he arrived in Japan, brought with him the refined draftsmanship of European academic painting and the bold, color-driven techniques of post-Impressionism. Yet he adapted effortlessly to the Japanese woodblock medium, working closely with carvers and printers to achieve a layered, almost tactile complexity—evident here in the rain-saturated texture and precisely registered colors.

This impression bears the round red “Series” seal at the top left corner and the artist’s signature in red crayon at the bottom margin This impression, a rare pre-earthquake design, is prized not only for its rarity but also for its superior color balance and printing quality, clearly visible throughout this striking design.