Horse

A single-subject print depicting a horse, this work stands apart from Kitaoka's landscape-dominated output and may reflect his early academic training in figurative drawing under Fujishima Takeji at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. The horse as subject in Japanese printmaking carries associations with both agricultural labor and martial imagery, though in a mid-twentieth-century sosaku-hanga context the treatment is more likely formal or expressionist than narrative. Kitaoka would have carved the animal's form with attention to musculature and contour, probably against a minimal or abstracted ground. The composition may draw on his observation of working horses in Manchuria during the wartime years, a period that influenced his social-realist phase.