was a Japanese print publisher and the driving force behind the Japanese printmaking movement known as shin hanga

Shin hanga

was an art movement in early 20th-century Japan, during the Taishō and Shōwa periods, that revitalized traditional ukiyo-e art rooted in the Edo and Meiji periods...

("new prints"). He started his career working for the export company of Kobayashi Bunshichi, which gave him an opportunity to learn about exporting art prints. In 1908, Watanabe married Chiyo, a daughter of the woodblock carver Chikamatsu.

Watanabe employed highly skilled carvers and printers, and commissioned artists to design prints that combined traditional Japanese techniques with elements of contemporary Western painting, such as perspective and shadows. Watanabe coined the term shin hanga in 1915 to describe such prints. Charles W. Bartlett

Charles W. Bartlett

Charles William Bartlett was an English painter and printmaker. He studied metallurgy and worked in that field for several years. At age 23, he enrolled in the Royal Academy in London, where he studied painting and etching...

, Hashiguchi Goyō

Hashiguchi Goyo

was an artist in Japan.-Early life:Hashiguchi was born Hashiguchi Kiyoshi in Kagoshima Prefecture. His father Hashiguchi Kanemizu was a samurai and amateur painter in the Shijo style. His father hired a teacher in the Kano style of painting in 1899 when Kiyoshi was only ten...

, Kawase Hasui

Kawase Hasui

was a prominent Japanese painter of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and one of the chief printmakers in the shin hanga movement.Kawase studied ukiyo-e and Japanese style painting at the studio of Kaburagi Kiyokata...

, Yoshida Hiroshi, Kasamatsu Shirō, Torii Kōtondō, Ohara Koson (Shōson), Terashima Shimei, Itō Shinsui

Ito Shinsui

, was the pseudonym of a Nihonga painter and ukiyo-e woodblock print artist in Taishō and Shōwa period Japan. He was one of the great names of the shin hanga art movement, which revitalized the traditional art after it began to decline with the advent of photography in the early 20th century. His...

, Takahashi Shôtei (Hiroaki) and Yamakawa Shuho are among the artists whose works he published.

Much of his company's stockpile of both prints & their original printing-blocks was destroyed in the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. In the following years, new versions of many of these prints were created, using re-carved blocks; typically, the re-issued "post-quake" prints included changes/revisions in the design.

Watanabe exported most of his shin hanga prints to the United States and Europe due to a lack of Japanese interest. After the close of World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

his heirs continued the business, which still operates.