No. 398 (Girl with Flower)

No. 398 (Girl with Flower), printed about 1957 from an edition of thirty (this impression numbered 23/30), develops the wide-eyed-child subject of the early Ikeda Shūzō corpus into a slightly more emblematic composition. The sheet measures approximately 11 7/8 by 7 3/8 inches and is printed on Japanese [hosho](/glossary/hosho) paper. A single standing girl, again rendered with the very large, dark eyes that are the artist's signature, holds or stands beside a single flower — the small, isolated motif that, in Ikeda's prints of the late 1950s and 1960s, often substitutes for narrative and supplies the image with a domestic or seasonal register. The print is built up from the artist's by-now-characteristic combination of clean colour blocks and the deliberately exposed grain of the cherrywood plate, which registers across face, garment, and ground as a long horizontal striation that integrates the figure into the wood rather than presenting her against neutral colour. The work is signed in white ink at the lower left of the image and inscribed in pencil 'No 398' in the lower-left margin, consistent with the sequential numbering system Ikeda used across his career; the edition designation places this impression within the small editions of around twenty to thirty that were standard for his self-published woodblocks of this period.