Portrait of Dr. Fujikake

Shizuya Fujikake (1881–1958) was a Japanese scholar of ukiyo-e and author of reference works that shaped modern understanding of Edo-period printmaking, and a teacher to a generation of younger printmakers. Kitaoka's portrait of him belongs to a small strand of the sosaku-hanga catalogue in which the movement's artists rendered fellow figures of the Japanese print world — collectors, scholars, and practitioners — as a form of intra-community acknowledgement. Portraiture in woodblock relief presents the carver with the specific challenge of rendering individuated facial features through the subtractive logic of the block; outcomes range from the schematic to the modelled, with Kitaoka generally working in a graphic, planar idiom inherited from his oil-painting training under Fujishima Takeji at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. The print stands as a document of mid-twentieth-century Japanese print scholarship as much as of its sitter.