Portrait of a Woman

Portrait of a Woman, a 1915 woodblock, applies the sosaku-hanga approach to individual portraiture. Unlike the idealized beauties of bijin-ga, a portrait implies attention to specific features, the face of a particular person rather than a type. Tobari carved this block himself, meaning the woman's likeness passed directly from his observation through his knife into the wood without an intermediary carver's interpretation. The 1915 date places this early in the sosaku-hanga movement, when artists were still establishing that self-carved, self-printed portraits could carry the psychological depth and individual specificity that portraiture demands.