No. 147 (portrait of a girl)

Ikeda Shūzō's No. 147 (portrait of a girl), made about 1957 and printed from a small edition of twenty (this impression numbered 5/20), is an early example of the wide-eyed-child subject that would organize his work for the next four decades. The image measures approximately 12 by 8 1/8 inches and is printed on Japanese [hosho](/glossary/hosho) — the soft, absorbent mulberry-fibre paper preferred by sōsaku-hanga artists for its capacity to register both fine line and the textural grain of the cherrywood block. A single child fills the central field of the sheet, the head rendered with the large, dark, almost monumental eyes that are Ikeda's signature: the eyes are blocked in as broad ovals of ink and surrounded by the soft outline of brow and cheek, with the face left otherwise largely open to the natural grain of the wood. The block has been printed in a way that allows the long, horizontal lines of the cherrywood plate to register directly onto the paper, so that the child's garment and the surrounding ground share the same striated texture — the wood-grain as both atmosphere and surface. The print is signed in white ink at the lower right of the image, with a second signature in pencil at the lower left and the edition number and title also pencilled into the lower margin, in the manner standard for sōsaku-hanga editions of the period. As one of the earliest dated impressions of Ikeda's mature children-with-large-eyes manner, No. 147 documents the moment when his career-defining subject took settled form.