Girl With fruit basket

"Girl With fruit basket" departs from the temple architecture and Buddhist iconography that consumed most of Sasajima's working life and turns to a figural genre subject — a child carrying a basket of seasonal fruit. The composition stands closer to the bijin-ga and minor figural traditions of earlier Japanese printmaking than to his usual concerns, though Sasajima would have rejected the smooth keyblock outlines and graded color of commercial nishiki-e in favor of the rougher, hand-carved surface his sosaku-hanga training under Onchi Koshiro instilled. Knife marks remain visible, blocks are heavily worked, and the printed black retains the irregular density of pressure applied by hand with the baren. Such departures from his core subject occur periodically through his fifty-year career and indicate a printmaker willing to test his hand-carved idiom against subjects outside his architectural specialty without altering his commitment to designing, cutting, and printing every block himself.