Iris Landscape

An etching combining iris flowers with a landscape setting, the kind of plant-and-place pairing that aligns Hansen with the Japanese kacho-e tradition of bird-and-flower imagery and with landscape-with-flowers compositions in the wider Edo print catalogue. Iris in particular has a long history in Japanese painting and printmaking — as kakitsubata at Yatsuhashi or as ayame in Edo gardens — and Hansen's openness to Japanese sources is acknowledged across his work. As an etching, the print would have let him work the spike-leaved iris foliage in firm vertical line against a more atmospheric handling of the surrounding ground or pond. The 1977 date places it among his late-1970s flower studies, alongside the Daffodil etching of the same year, and within a strand of his catalogue that brought the gardens and damp ground of Vashon Island into a format that borrowed openly from Japanese print conventions while remaining technically European.