Iris

The iris occupies a long-standing place in kacho-e — the bird-and-flower genre — associated with Ogata Korin's screens and Hokusai's botanical prints, but Hagiwara's treatment likely abstracts the flower into a study of color and edge rather than a botanical record. His multi-block technique would allow for the layered violets, blues, and yellow-greens characteristic of the iris, printed in translucent overlays to construct a saturated but airy surface. The sosaku-hanga movement, of which Hagiwara was a quiet and accomplished participant, encouraged artists to take traditional subjects and rework them through personal sensibility, and his iris belongs to that tradition of selective inheritance. The print also connects to his broader interest in luminosity — the same quality that informs his gemstone-inspired and Stone Garden series — applied here to a subject whose petals possess their own kind of mineral depth and chromatic complexity.