Details

Waterfall (1950) by Okiie Hashimoto captures a moment suspended between awe and introspection. A solitary figure stands with his back to us, immobile before a roaring, vertical plume of white mist and water that rises like a celestial veil from a hidden ravine below. The dramatic surge of the waterfall echoes the upright stance of the man himself—each form a pillar of stillness and force, parallel expressions of gravity and presence. In the foreground, a group of distant visitors—each detailed yet ephemeral—gather on a viewing platform, dwarfed by the sublime grandeur of nature. The cascading verticality of the falls dissolves into vapor, rendered in delicate tonal washes that blur the barrier between earth and sky.

Hashimoto’s intuitive layering of colors and textures—subtle gradations of gray, off-white, and muted blue—demonstrates the artist’s full command of the Sosaku Hanga ideal: art as self-expression, created entirely by the artist's own hand. His early prints, including Waterfall, show the unmistakable influence of Onchi Koshiro, Hashimoto’s mentor and the philosophical heart of the Sosaku Hanga movement. Here, organic softness and gestural linework create an atmosphere that is less about landscape than it is about reverie—a meditation on scale, solitude, and transience.

Connoisseur's Note

Waterfall is a rare and poignant example of Okiie Hashimoto’s early printmaking, executed just five years after the end of the Pacific War, at a time when the artist was experimenting with mood, abstraction, and personal vision. It stands apart from the later architectural precision for which he is most widely known, offering instead a raw and lyrical meditation on nature’s immensity and human humility.

The loose, atmospheric printing technique—rooted in Onchi’s legacy—reveals Hashimoto’s early emotional range and compositional daring. This impression, marked as an Artist’s Proof, underscores the work’s rarity and importance. It remains one of the most resonant and poetic statements from Hashimoto’s formative period.