Kinchinjanga from "India and Southeast Asia Series"

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Kinchinjanga from "India and Southeast Asia Series"

Artist Hiroshi Yoshida Japanese, 1876-1950

Date1931

DimensionsSheet: 10 3/4 × 16 in. (27.3 × 40.6 cm)
Image: 9 7/8 × 14 15/16 in. (25.1 × 37.9 cm)

Mediumwoodblock print

ClassificationPrints

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, by exchange

Object number

2008.41

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Published ReferencesThe Complete Woodblock Prints of Yoshida Hiroshi, ABE Corporation, Tokyo, 1996.Label TextAfter the Revolutionary War, America was free to trade directly with other nations. European decorative objects like this elegant pair of French lamps became status symbols in wealthy homes. The sinumbra lamp (from the Latin sine, without, and umbra, shadow) was designed so that the ring-shaped whale-oil reservoir would not cast a shadow when the lamp was lit, as earlier designs had done. In order to be most effective, these lamps had to be quite tall, with a glass shade curving up to a narrow waist. This pair is particularly distinguished by its incorporation of blue opaline glass. Whale oil was the most popular way to light homes in the first half of the 1800s. Extracted from the heads of Sperm Whales, the oil was in demand for everything from heating to soap to textile processing, propelling whaling to the fifth-largest industry in the United States (immortalized in popular culture by the publication of Moby Dick in 1851). By the 1850s, the decline of Sperm Whales from over-hunting and the subsequent rising price of whale oil helped to precipitate a change to petroleum-based kerosene.