Cat (variant 2)

Cat is an undated Taishō or early Shōwa print by Hasegawa Sadanobu III (1881-1963), preserved on [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org (https://ukiyo-e.org/image/wbp/846345778). Cats appear sporadically across ukiyo-e from the early Edo period onward — most famously in Kuniyoshi's mid-nineteenth-century cat designs and series such as the Sixty-odd Provinces of Japan rendered as cats and the various anthropomorphic cat triptychs of the 1840s — and in the long [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) tradition where domestic cats accompany women in everyday scenes, the cat had a stable iconographic place. The subject persisted into the Taishō and early Shōwa years as occasional standalone images for workshops still producing in the late ukiyo-e idiom. As third head of the Hasegawa Osaka-Kyoto print house, Sadanobu III worked through a period in which the workshop sustained a small repertoire of single-subject animal and genre prints alongside its core theatrical and Kyoto-bijin output, often distributed through the same Osaka, Kyoto, and Yokohama dealers that handled the workshop's [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e) and maiko prints. A single-cat design isolated against a plain ground, in the workshop's typical clean late-Hasegawa manner, draws on this long-running ukiyo-e interest in domestic animals as standalone pictorial subjects, but reads with the quieter palette and softer outline characteristic of Taishō-era print culture. The ukiyo-e.org record carries the impression as a Sadanobu III print without museum-level cataloguing; the existence of a closely related companion variant in the workshop's output (under wbp/846346303) indicates that the cat subject was produced in a small set or as a re-cut design kept in active circulation, satisfying interwar collectors interested in the Hasegawa workshop's lighter, non-theatrical Kansai prints.