The preparatory drawing/watercolour of Himeji Castle multicolour autumn

This sheet is the preparatory drawing and watercolour for the woodblock print Multicoloured autumn - Himeji Castle, recording Hashimoto's working stage between on-site observation and block cutting. As a sosaku-hanga artist who designed, carved, and printed every block himself, Hashimoto used the watercolour study to fix the composition of Himeji's white tenshu rising above autumn foliage, to allocate colour areas across what would become separate blocks, and to test the bokashi gradations he intended to pull on the final print. Surviving preparatory drawings are uncommon in the sosaku-hanga corpus precisely because the same hand carried the work from sketch to printed sheet; many were absorbed into studio practice rather than preserved. The drawing's value lies in showing how the architectural geometry of the castle was set out in line and the autumn palette was already differentiated in wash before any wood was cut. It documents the upstream stage of a print that Hashimoto returned to as part of his long engagement with the Himeji subject.