The Three Magi

Watanabe Sadao studied with Yanagi Soetsu (1889–1961), the founder of the Japanese Folk Art Movement, and Serizawa Keisuke (1895–1984), a noted stencil artist in the craft tradition that was celebrated by this national movement. Watanabe follows his mentors in utilizing traditional stencil techniques, which previously had been linked to utilitarian textile and decorated paper production. But Watanabe translated this technique into a fine art print form. Because Watanabe worked on a form of textured, crumpled Japanese paper and hand-painted the colors through the cut stencil by hand, each print in a new design is unique.

A converted Christian, Watanabe took his imagery from the stories of the Old and New Testaments. The subject of this print is based on a New Testament narrative: After worshipping the Christ Child, the Three Magi are warned by an angel in a dream not to return to the local ruler Herod, who seeks to destroy the divine baby, but to depart to their own country by another route (Matthew 2:12).

The visual source of inspiration for Watanabe’s unusual composition—in which the wise kings sleep together stacked over one another in a single bed and the angel touches the hand of one of them to announce the Lord’s warning—seems derived from a famous 12th-century French Romanesque carved stone capital in the Cathedral of Autun.