Cat's Parade

Cat's Parade extends Tomoo Inagaki's lifelong investigation of the feline form into a multi-figure composition, arranging several cats across the sheet in a procession-like sequence. Inagaki (1902-1980) was a central figure in the postwar sosaku-hanga (creative print) movement, and like many of his sosaku-hanga peers he committed himself to designing, carving, and printing his own woodblocks rather than working through the traditional publisher-led division of labor. Cats became his signature subject, and across decades he produced an unusually consistent body of cat prints that ranged from solitary studies to grouped compositions such as this one. Cat's Parade uses repetition and silhouette to turn its subject into a near-decorative pattern: each cat is reduced to a stylized shape, with bold contour and textured fill carrying the visual interest rather than naturalistic detail. The print is held in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) and documented through ukiyo-e.org's aggregated database, placing it among the Inagaki works preserved in a major American institutional collection. That museum provenance reflects the strong reception sosaku-hanga prints found in the United States during the mid-twentieth century, when artists like Inagaki, Saito Kiyoshi, and Munakata Shiko were collected and exhibited across the country. For collectors of cat prints specifically, or of postwar Japanese sosaku-hanga more broadly, Cat's Parade is an especially clear example of how Inagaki used serial, repeated forms to translate an everyday animal subject into a confidently modern graphic image carried entirely by the carved and printed woodblock surface.