JAPANESE WOODBLOCK PRINT BY LILIAN MAY MILLER 1927 (02/08/2011)

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JAPANESE WOODBLOCK PRINT BY LILIAN MAY MILLER 1927

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JAPANESE WOODBLOCK PRINT BY LILIAN MAY MILLER 1927

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Sold Date: 02/08/2011
Channel: Online Auction
Source: eBay
Category: Ethnic, Folk & Native American Art

AUTHENTIC & ORIGINAL ARTWORK

STUNNING JAPANESE WOODBLOCK PRINT

'A JAPANESE GARDEN'

BY LILIAN MAY MILLER

FABULOUS ESTATE SALE FIND!

RESCUED FROM A DETERIORATING COPY OF

GRASS BLADES FROM A CINAMMON GARDEN

PRINTED IN 1927 BY THE JAPAN ADVERTISER PRESS, TOKYO

ONE OF FOUR ORIGINAL WOODBLOCK PRINTS THAT WERE TIPPED INTO THIS BOOK OF POETRY

(PLEASE NOTE: THE BOOK IS NOT INCLUDED IN THIS AUCTION!)

PRINT IS IN EXCEPTIONAL CONDITION GIVEN ITS AGE AND STORAGE METHOD

COLORS ARE CRISP & VIBRANT

NO RIPS, TEARS OR CREASES; NEVER FRAMED

ARTWORK MEASURES 5-1/2" x 3-1/2" without border

A FINE ADDITION TO ANY COLLECTION!

WINNING U.S. BIDDER TO PAY FLAT S/H FEE OF $9.99

WINNING INT'L BIDDER TO PAY FLAT S/H FEE OF $19.99

THANK YOU FOR LOOKING!

BELOW FIND MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Miller was born in Japan, the daughter of an American diplomatic official. Through the efforts of Helen Hyde, Miller began at the age of nine what would become three years of painting study under the direction of Japanese style painter Tomonobu Kano. She was then taught Japanese style painting and ink painting by the history painter Bokusen Shimada. After eight years of schooling in America, Miller returned to Japan in 1917, where she resumed her painting studies with Bokusen. In 1920 her work was exhibited in an official exhibition where it received a prize. It was around this time that Miller began to make woodblock prints. In 1927, carving and printing her own designs. In 1927, she gathered the poems that had been published up until that time in the Japan Advertiser, added her own illustrations and published the volume Grass Blades from a Cinnamon Garden in Tokyo.
In 1929 Miller spent six months in America where she held woodblock print exhibitions and gave lectures. Her exhibitions during this period included forty-five prints on Japanese and Korean subjects. At her one-woman show in Washington she wore kimono during five demonstrations of woodblock printing. Her works had already been added to the collections of the Chicago Art Institute and the British Museum.
She moved to Kyoto in 1930 and then, having been operated on for cancer, moved to Hawaii in 1936 where she created wall paintings, screens and paintings using brush and ink. In 1938, in the 10th exhibition of the Honolulu Print Makers, she exhibited a print depicting bamboo using a lithotint method that achieved the effect of ink painting. That work was then published by the local newspaper. She moved to San Francisco seeking a broader market, but after the attack of Pearl Harbor she signed on with a Naval counter propaganda branch as a Japanese censor and research analyst in Washington, D.C. She died of cancer in 1943.
The woodblock prints by Miller known today are primarily landscape and genre scenes from Japan and Korea, the countries where she spent most of her life, and it is said that she carved her own blocks and printed her own sheets. Her compositions, some of which include a large tree or pillar in the foreground, and her use of such techniques as mica or black ground impressions, speak of her thorough study of the ukiyo-e prints of the past.