Portrait of Mrs. Onchi (Nobuo)

"Portrait of Mrs. Onchi (Nobuo)" is a domestic portrait of the artist's wife — among the most intimate of his many portrait subjects. Portraits of family members in Onchi's work carry a different emotional register than his public cultural portraits: more private in the quality of observation, more direct in their acknowledgment of an ongoing relationship between artist and subject. The portrait of a wife is also, in the sosaku-hanga context, a declaration of the private domestic world as worthy of the same serious artistic attention as public cultural figures.