Charles Bartlett, Lake Shoji (Fujiyama Amid Clouds)

Notes: Signed in crayon, monogram in key block; titled and dated in key block. Circular Watanabe seal. Shoji, Japan - Fuji-Yama appears above the mists, with a full moon rising. Bartlett comments, 'Above the clinging mists of earth / There lies a way / Clear cut to God's own Heaven, / Night turned to day.' Bartlett's 1916 woodblock prints of Indian scenes were already on exhibition at the galleries of the Berlin Photographic Company in New York City that same year, alongside color woodblock prints by such American artists as Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922) and Margaret Patterson (1867-1950). His prints found immediate appreciation on the American market. When he hand a one-man show of Asian subjects in New York in 1919, his work was euphemistically described as 'raised to high spiritual significance, and made to breathe the very spirit and mood of the East'. Over the next two decades he continued to rework Asian themes.