Page 126 - September 21 2021 Important Japanese Art Christie's NYC

158 KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI (1760-1849)

Irises and Grasshopper

Woodblock print, from an untitled series
known as 'Large Flowers', signed Saki no
Hokusai Iitsu hitsu, published by Nishimuraya
Yohachi (Eijudo), circa 1833-34
Horizontal oban: 9¬ x 14¡ in. (24.4 x 36.5 cm.)

$60,000-80,000

PROVENANCE:
Henri Vever (1854-1943), Paris, sold Sotheby's, London, An agile green and orange grasshopper is making its way down
Highly Important Japanese Prints, Illustrated Books and the slender edge of the central leaf of a stand of irises in a blue
Drawings from the Henri Vever Collection: Part II, 26 pond. The younger shoots are light green and the blossoms pale
and darker purple with inner licks of yellow. The vertical fold
March 1975, lot 290
and residue of adhesion on the verso suggest the print once was
Huguette Berès (1914-1999), sold Sotheby’s, Paris,
mounted in an album in the tradition of The Mustard Seed Garden
Collection Huguette Berès: Estampes, Dessins et Livres
and other popular bird-and-flower books. It is widely remarked
Illustrés Japonais (Première Vente), 27 November 2002, that ukiyo-e of irises, this Hokusai image in particular, were the
lot 98. inspiration for Van Gogh’s Irises in the Getty Museum.
Those details are effectively irrelevant to the point of Hokusai’s
LITERATURE:
drawing: the pulse of nature. The flowers have a mutual rhythm,
Jack Hillier, Japanese Prints and Paintings from the Vever arching and twisting as if in a dance. We see them in close-up
Collection, vol. 3 (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet; New at eye-level––in their realm, not looking down from ours. Each
of the ten recorded images in the untitled set have this unusual
York: Rizzoli, 1976), no. 699, p. 709.
perspective and vibration.
Henri Vever is as renowned as a connoisseur of Japanese art
as he is as a designer of art-nouveau jewellery. His red seal on
Japanese prints, as here, is a hallmark of quality. Print collectors
are envious of the glorious conditions Vever enjoyed in the
decades around 1900, when thousands and thousands of ukiyo-e
were circulating in Europe. Vever had the eye and connections

Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890). Irises. France. 1889.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 90.PA.20