Colts

Colts, made by Hatsuyama Shigeru in 1948, is a key early example of the artist's postwar woodblock practice, completed just as Japan's print community was reassembling itself in the difficult years immediately following defeat. The composition shows a group of young horses arranged across the sheet in flattened, near-silhouetted forms, their bodies stylized into broad areas of warm and cool color with only the most economical interior detail. Rather than aim at naturalistic anatomy, Hatsuyama draws on the visual logic he had honed as one of Japan's most prolific prewar children's-book illustrators: simple contours, clear color blocks, and a strong rhythmic distribution of figures across the page. The choice of subject — playful young horses — also reflects his lifelong commitment to childhood imagery; he had quietly withdrawn from the kind of magazine illustration that, in the late 1930s, had been increasingly co-opted into wartime propaganda, and turned instead to the freer territory of independent prints. As a sōsaku-hanga (creative print) artist, Hatsuyama designed, carved, and printed each impression himself, treating the block as a personal medium rather than a commercial one. The Art Institute of Chicago, which holds this impression and lists it in its online collection (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/84184), preserves Colts as a particularly clean example of Hatsuyama's idiom in the late 1940s. For students of his work, the 1948 print marks a moment when an illustrator of national reputation was deliberately remaking himself as an autonomous printmaker, while keeping the warmth and clarity of children's book design at the core of his style.