Autumn

Autumn addresses the seasonal subject of koyo, the turning of leaves, treated in Japanese printmaking from the kacho-e bird-and-flower tradition through to twentieth-century landscape work. In Nagase's sosaku-hanga handling, the motif would typically be organized around carved color masses rather than the fine outline-and-fill technique of earlier nishiki-e, with the warm reds, ochres, and rusts of autumn foliage printed from separate blocks aligned by kento registration marks. The artist's chisel marks often remain visible in the printed surface, a deliberate signature of the creative-print method that distinguishes it from the polished finish of commercial production. Nagase's authorship of the 1922 manual To People Who Want to Make Prints made him an influential teacher of exactly these techniques, and seasonal landscape subjects of this kind formed a recurring strand in his output alongside figure studies and the more experimental work that followed his years in France.