Image No.6 Motherhood (1)

This 1950 woodblock print, numbered as Image No. 6 in what appears to be a thematic series, addresses the subject of motherhood through Yamamoto's late-career lens. By this point in his life, Yamamoto had spent decades refining the sosaku-hanga approach, and his treatment of the maternal figure carries the accumulated weight of that experience. The mother-and-child subject connects to universal themes of nurturing and human bonds, rendered without the sentimentality that often accompanies such imagery. Yamamoto's carving in this later work tends toward greater abstraction than his earlier, more descriptively detailed prints, reducing the figures to essential forms that emphasize the emotional relationship between mother and child over physical specifics.