Sekino Junichirô

A self-portrait, identified by the artist's own name as its title — a subject Sekino returned to repeatedly throughout his career as part of the sosaku-hanga movement's commitment to the printmaker as an autonomous creative individual rather than a craftsman embedded in the older Edo-period publisher–designer–carver–printer division of labor. Sekino was particularly noted for portraiture, applying the same disciplined compositional approach to his own features as he did to his portraits of writers, scholars, and kabuki actors. Self-portraits in his hand typically use bold contour lines paired with carefully modulated bokashi to model facial structure, often set against a flat or minimally detailed ground that throws the face into relief. The work participates in a broader twentieth-century strand of artist self-portraiture across media, but executed within the specific technical vocabulary of mokuhanga — washi paper, water-based pigment, and the baren-pulled impression.