Fawn is coming

Fawn is coming depicts a young deer in motion or at the edge of a scene, a subject that places the print in the broader tradition of kacho-e---the bird, flower, and animal genre that emerged as a major branch of ukiyo-e in the nineteenth century and continued to flourish in twentieth-century mokuhanga. Deer and fawns carry strong associations in Japanese visual culture with autumn, with the sacred deer of Nara, and with poetic seasonal imagery, and a print built around a single approaching fawn typically isolates the animal against a pared-down ground that emphasizes pose and silhouette. The mokuhanga technique handles soft animal coats well, since carved keyblock outlines can be combined with colour blocks printed in bokashi to suggest dappled hide or grass. Within Fukami Gashu's documented output, which references the style of Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Fawn is coming represents the gentler kacho-e strand of that lineage rather than its warrior-print mode.