The SadaoHanga Catalogue

Introduction to The SadaoHanga Catalogue

The SadaoHanga Catalogue offers a  comprehensive catalogue of the works of the Japanese artist Sadao Watanabe 渡辺禎雄. He cut hundreds of stencils and made thousands of prints in his Tokyo home and workshop, assisted by his wife Harue Watanabe. A lot of these prints are reproduced in books about his work and in sales and museum catalogues.  And last but not least, they can be found on dozens of websites.

The SadaoHanga Catalogue’s purpose is to catalogue all the art of Sadao Watanabe for lovers of his work, for students and scholars, and everyone interested in his fascinating rendering of Biblical stories. The catalogue is also helpful for identifying his prints and evaluating the quality of a print.

The catalogue is still in progress. The entries of Watanabe’s works on momigami is primarily based on the catalogue of works in Biblical Prints by Sadao Watanabe, Shinkyo Shuppansha Tokyo, 1986. That catalogue is the most important source because Sadao Watanabe was, with Masao Takenaka 竹中正夫 , the author of that book.

The catalogue in Biblical Prints has its limitations: it is not complete and does of course not contain the works made in the period 1985 to 1996. To increase the usefulness of the catalogue I numbered the works. 

Catalogue numbers of the works

The catalogue numbers of the large sized momigami prints  follow the order of the catalogue in Biblical Prints and are numbered by year. The registration numbers I attributed to the works that are not mentioned in Biblical Prints are arbitrary. The catalogue numbers of the smaller works on washi are also numbered by year, according the date on the prints.

Titles

The titles of the works that are catalogued in Biblical Prints are adopted. The titles of the works that are not mentioned in Biblical Prints or are made after 1985, are given by me according to sources as sales catalogues from the 1960s to the 1990s or according to the biblical story that is represented on the print .

Size of the prints

The size of the prints is based on data I found in references and on the internet. They are approximately correct because the sheets of momigami, on which the works are executed, will vary in size and because I rounded up the sizes. If the size of a momigami prints is much smaller than stated, it probably is a reproduction used for a calendar.

Images

The images come from a variety of sources, such as my own collection, donated images, and the internet. A very important source of images have been the visitors of The SadaoHanga Catalogue. They have contributed lots of images since 2007 and I'm grateful to all visitors who shared images of their prints. The image database is not complete. Some of the titles are uncertain, but most are correct.

The SadaoHanga Catalogue is, as you will experience, not complete in its descriptions. Please inform me, by sending a message to sadaohanga[at]gmail.com, if you have additional information (pictures, references, descriptions etc.) that will lead to a more complete catalogue.

This site is compiled and managed by mr. Jan Catsburg, from the Netherlands, member of the Society for Japanese Arts, as a public source of information on the works of the Japanese artist-artisan Sadao Watanabe (1913 – 1996).