March Cherry blossoms by moonlight

A second variant of Sekino's March Cherry blossoms by moonlight, depicting sakura against a night sky illuminated by an early-spring moon. The two related sheets reflect the small-edition character of much sosaku-hanga production, where the printmaker — designing, cutting, and pulling impressions himself — could rework a single subject across different colour states, paper choices, or compositional adjustments. Cherry-blossoms-with-moon belongs to a long lineage of Japanese print imagery, sitting close to kachô-e while drawing on the seasonal-poetic vocabulary of waka and haiku. Technically the subject is built around contrast: a heavily printed dark sky, frequently achieved through layered bokashi gradations, set against pale blossoms held as reserved or thinly tinted areas of washi. Sekino's broader output ranged from the long-form Tôkaidô series and portrait cycles to single seasonal subjects of this kind, which were produced alongside rather than in opposition to his more documentary landscape work.