Fisherman

Fisherman (Gyofu, 1904) depicts a Japanese fisherman shown at close range, his weathered features and rough working clothes rendered with a directness that departed from the polished surfaces of late Meiji ukiyo-e. Yamamoto cut the block himself rather than handing his design to a professional carver, and the visible knife strokes — angular gouges across the face, broad facets through the garments — became the picture's central expressive device. The figure occupies most of the picture plane in a manner closer to Western portrait painting than to traditional bijin-ga or yakusha-e conventions. Printed in a restricted palette with limited registration, the work shows the artist absorbing influences from European woodcut, particularly the German and French printmakers he had encountered through art journals while at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. Its 1904 publication in the magazine Myojo introduced the principle of jiga-jikoku-jizuri (self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed) to a Japanese audience, an approach that would crystallize into the sosaku-hanga movement and define Yamamoto's role as its founding figure.