Dog

Dog is a sosaku-hanga woodblock print by Saito Kiyoshi, a member of the small group of animal subjects — dogs, cats, fish — that run alongside his better-known Aizu winter series and his Haniwa figures. Saito Kiyoshi built his international career on the sosaku-hanga (creative print) principle that the artist alone designs, carves and prints the block, a doctrine summarized as jiga, jikoku, jizuri, and the animal prints are unusually direct examples of that practice: a single creature, isolated against the cream of the paper, modeled with broad inked shapes and a few confident contour lines. The natural grain of the woodblock is left to print through, so the animal is set against not a flat ground but a faintly grained one, the timber asserting itself as material — the same surface treatment Saito uses for the snow fields of the Aizu winter series and the gravel at Ryoan-ji. After his 1948 solo show at Mitsukoshi and his 1951 prize at the São Paulo Biennale, Saito's reputation extended into the United States and Europe, where the legibility of his animal subjects made them favorite small acquisitions for new collectors of postwar Japanese print. The print is documented in the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria's collection of twentieth-century Japanese woodblock prints, aggregated on ukiyo-e.org. For collectors of Saito Kiyoshi, the animal prints are a sympathetic counterpart to the more austere temple gardens and Aizu winter landscapes.