Art Institute of Chicago

Richard Steiner is an American sosaku-hanga printmaker who has lived and worked in Kyoto since 1980, where he studied under master printer Tomikichiro Tokuriki and absorbed the Japanese creative-print tradition at its source. This artwork enters the broader Kyoto mokuhanga tradition through Steiner's distinctive approach: as a foreign-born artist deeply embedded in the Kansai printmaking community, he has spent more than four decades translating the technical vocabulary of traditional Japanese woodblock printing into a personal visual language that bridges American sensibilities and Japanese craft heritage.

The attribution recorded for this print connects it to institutional collections that have helped document the international reach of postwar Japanese-style printmaking, with the source image catalogued through ukiyo-e.org. Like other works in Steiner's mature output, the print would have been produced entirely by his own hand, from the carving of multiple cherry-wood blocks to the careful hand-burnishing of each impression with a baren. This commitment to the full sosaku-hanga creed of jiga, jikoku, jizuri — self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed — places Steiner firmly within the philosophical lineage of Onchi Koshiro, Munakata Shiko, and the twentieth-century Japanese creative-print movement that prized the individual artist's hand over the traditional workshop division of labor.

Steiner's position as an American sosaku-hanga practitioner working from a Kyoto studio gives his prints an unusual cultural register: the disciplined registration, layered color washes, and respect for the wood grain are recognizably Japanese, while the compositional instincts often reflect Western training in design and observation. Collectors of Kyoto mokuhanga value this hybrid quality, and Steiner has exhibited internationally while remaining grounded in Japan's printmaking infrastructure of paper makers, pigment suppliers, and tool craftsmen. Documented through ukiyo-e.org, this work contributes to the public record of contemporary woodblock printing produced by a long-resident foreign artist within Japan's living print tradition.