Ohara Koson

Beginning when he was a student at the Cleveland School of Art, Charles Burchfield admired the prints of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and Ando Hiroshige (1797-1853), borrowing some of their strategies for design and composition for his own landscape paintings. In July 1915 he wrote: “Three great artistic men I love — I dream often of the possibility of a friendship with them were they living!  They are Omar Khayyham the Poet; Wagner, the Composer; & Hokusai the Artist.” Four months later his school friend Frank Daniels told him about “a book he found called the ‘Heritage of Hiroshige’ & told wherein Hiroshige wrote little poems one of which told how ‘I laughed at the moon, & the moon laughed at me,’ which began Burchfield’s admiration for another Japanese printmaker. Personally, Burchfield owned two prints of birds by Ohara Koson (1877-1945).  A brief biography available on the Web states: 

Originally named Ohara Matao, the Japanese painter Ohara Koson probably studied painting and design in his native Kanazawa. He subsequently adopted the name Koson from his teacher, the artist Suzuki Kason. In the mid-1890s Ohara Koson moved to Tokyo, a city where Western influences were increasingly prevalent. Here Koson designed woodcuts for publishers supplying the Western market. In fact, he did not carve the woodcuts himself, simply supplying his designs in the form of paintings. His subjects were invariably from nature, a particular favourite being birds. In all he completed around 450 designs for woodcuts of birds. Koson changed his name after 1910 to Shoson, and later again to Hoson. 

An excerpt from"Who were Ohara Shōson and Hashimoto Koei?," https://diluo.digital.conncoll.edu/Asianart/exhibition/representations-of-herons-in-ohara-shoson-and-hashimoto-koeis-japanese-woodblock-prints/:

Born in 1877, Ohara Koson first began training in Nihonga Japanese-style painting under the Maruyama-Shijō school. His specialty at the time was in “shin-hanga”, which was a woodblock print movement that mixed Western and Japanese artistic elements. After the Russo-Japanese war, his kacho-e prints gained traction as his artistic techniques and affordable prices were popular in the West. In 1912, Ohara changed his last name to Shōson, and worked with publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō to create five bird prints that are currently in Te Papa’s collection. 

Although there is less known about Hashimoto Koei, he is reported to have been born in 1892 in Yawata, in the Gifu Prefecture. In 1908 he moved to Kyoto to study under Takeuchi Seiho, and married the daughter of Nanga painter Ikeda Keisen in 1936. Similarly to Ohara Shōson, Hashimoto Koei’s work includes watercolor gradients and kacho-e themes. Yet, Koei has a distinctly sharper embossing style, and rarely portrays herons in his prints.

Both artists are also shown to use similar printing techniques. This includes his application of “karazuri-e gauffrage” (to emboss in feathers), the “tsukekate” (to imply the gray silhouettes of bodies), and punching holes into the wood block (to create negative space – suggesting snow). The famous watercolor gradients seen in the backgrounds of both artists’ work are also the result of the synthesis of brush and print techniques.