Portrait of Shiga Naoya, Shôwa period, circa 1967?

This circa 1967 portrait of the novelist Naoya Shiga (1883–1971) depicts a man approaching his mid-eighties, near the end of a long and distinguished literary career. If this is a separate work from the undated portrait of Shiga in the collection, it may represent a later interpretation of the same subject—Shiga's features in advanced age, the economy of an elderly face that suited Sekino's formal interests in essential line and reduced color. By the late 1960s Sekino's portrait practice was fully mature, and his technical command of the woodblock medium allowed him to extract maximum expressive value from minimal means. The washi paper ground, the baren-pressed ink impression, and the directness of carved line combine to give late Sekino portraits a quality of compressed observation. Shiga's literary legacy made him a recurring reference point for Shōwa cultural memory, and Sekino's portrait contributes to that documentation.