A Ball

A woodblock print depicting a child's ball, likely issued as a standalone design related to Hasui's broader interest in children's subjects during the 1920s and 1930s. The subject is treated as a still-life or genre vignette rather than a landscape, representing a departure from the [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) tradition that anchored most of his output. [Shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) publishers experimented with figure and object subjects alongside landscape designs to diversify their catalogues, and Hasui contributed several prints in this mode. The compositional focus on a single object allows close attention to color and texture—the matte surface of a rubber or cloth ball, the shadow it casts—rendered through the precise color registration and hand-printing techniques of the woodblock medium.