Mr Ozeki's daughter

This portrait depicts the daughter of an acquaintance named Ozeki and belongs to the body of intimate sitter studies that became a defining strand of Sekino's output. Working within the sosaku-hanga tradition, Sekino carved, printed, and signed his portraits himself, producing likenesses that blend observed character with deliberate flattening of form. The print likely uses bold blocks of color set against subdued grounds, with carved line drawing the face and a more textural, sometimes gauffraged or wood-grained background giving weight to the figure. Sekino's portrait practice — which also produced known images of cultural figures such as Hasegawa Kiyoshi and Munakata Shiko — typically isolates the sitter against a near-abstract field, shifting attention from anecdote to the structure of the face. As a personal commission rather than a commemorative likeness, Mr Ozeki's Daughter sits closer to the European portrait tradition Sekino studied than to ukiyo-e bijin-ga, though the use of mokuhanga technique and washi anchors the image firmly in Japanese print culture.