Girl and Irises

A close cousin to Hashimoto's Young Woman and Irises compositions, this print substitutes a younger subject — a girl rather than an adult woman — placed against the same upright screen of iris stalks. Children appear less frequently than adult women in his figural work, and when they do, they are typically rendered with the same flat-plane economy: kimono reduced to a few carved color shapes, hair as a single dark mass, face drawn with minimal line. The irises themselves carry their seasonal weight (early summer) and their long literary lineage from Ariwara no Narihira's Yatsuhashi crossing in the Tales of Ise, a scene that Ogata Kōrin made canonical and that postwar printmakers continued to engage. Hashimoto cuts the iris leaves as long, sword-straight strokes that exploit the woodgrain, and the blossoms are typically printed in two or three pulls of indigo and violet over a pale ground. The print belongs to the figural strand of his work that runs alongside, and is structurally informed by, his architectural prints.