Montmartre At night

The print depicts the Montmartre quarter of Paris after nightfall, the hill on the Rive Droite long associated with artists' studios, the basilica of Sacré-Cœur, and a dense fabric of cabarets and stepped lanes. Sekino travelled in Europe and the United States from 1958 onward as a visiting artist and lecturer, and his foreign cityscapes form a sustained strand of his work alongside the Tôkaidô series and the portrait suites. Night scenes of this kind generally rely on a dark key block carrying the architectural drawing, with bokashi gradations and reserved areas of paper white standing in for street lamps, illuminated windows, and the moon. As a sosaku-hanga printmaker Sekino designed, carved, and printed the sheet himself, working the colour blocks against hand-burnished washi rather than employing the divided-labour ukiyo-e workshop of designer, carver, and printer. The composition flattens Parisian façades into broad rectilinear planes, a graphic sensibility he carried across both his European and his Japanese subjects.