Cat

Cats had long been a subject in Japanese woodblock printmaking, from Utagawa Kuniyoshi's anthropomorphic feline series to Hiroshige's roof-tile cats observing Edo street life. Maeda's treatment, made in the sosaku-hanga manner, would set aside narrative or comic associations in favour of formal observation: the silhouette of the animal against a flat ground, the patterning of fur rendered through carved line or registered color block, the eyes as a focal point of carved detail. Working in self-carved, self-printed mode allowed expressive variation in inking — a heavily charged baren producing a denser black, a lighter pull bringing out the woodgrain through the dark. Compared with the elaborate genre and landscape subjects in his catalogue, the cat print represents the strain of intimate domestic subject matter that ran through twentieth-century Japanese printmaking. Such single-subject animal studies found a steady audience among collectors who wanted something graphically resolved but small in ambition.