Shurei
As written in the introduction, “Shurei” is another enigmatic artist published by Watanabe Shozaburo before the Great Kanto (1923).
The most famous print is “Rooster”, present in the Muller collection and in the MFA in Boston. On the back is the Watanabe inventory number 726 in Japanese characters (Muller collection, accession number: S2003.8.2138).
However, I have found other prints with the same signature, two of which have already been reported by Ross Walker on his JAODB site.
The most different given names have been attributed to Shurei: Nakagawa (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Takeuchi (Christie’s, may 2000: “sealed Takeuchi Shurei”) , Nakajima (Ross Walker, JAODB site), Yanai (Amy Reigle Stephens, The New Wave….1993) or Yauchi (Amy Newland, Printed to perfection.., 2004).
Due to the rarity of Shurei’s works, I have added a silk painting (Shurei-05), even though this site is only for woodblock prints.
It is unclear who exactly Shurei is, but the presence of a print edited by Kobayashi Bunshichi (here Shurei-01) leads me to believe that the name Shurei identifies a true artist and is not just a house name, as in other cases described in these pages.
Shurei prints
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