Sekino Jun'ichirô

This print bears the artist's own name as its subject and represents a self-portrait, a recurring genre across Sekino's figural work. Portraits were one of the foundations of his reputation: from the late 1940s onward he produced a long sequence of likenesses of writers, kabuki actors, fellow artists, and ordinary people from his native Aomori, working in the close-cropped, psychologically attentive idiom that distinguished his figural mokuhanga. As a sosaku-hanga artist Sekino designed, carved, and printed his own blocks on washi, and his portraits in particular relied on careful registration of multiple color blocks combined with bokashi to model flesh tones and shadow. A self-portrait allowed him to apply that observational method to himself, and surviving examples show him studying his own features with the same direct frontal or three-quarter framing he used for his sitters. The print sits within a portrait practice that ran in parallel with his Tokaido landscapes and his early kabuki theater work and that placed him alongside Onchi Kōshirō as one of the leading portraitists of the postwar sosaku-hanga generation.