November Moon

A late-autumn nocturne executed as a color mezzotint, requiring a separate rocked and burnished plate for each color, registered in sequence on a single sheet. November in the lunar calendar marks the deep transition into winter, and the print likely centers a low moon set against the bare branches and cooled palette of the season. Color mezzotint is technically demanding — rockers must be applied uniformly across each plate, and burnishing has to be calibrated so that highlights from one color do not muddy another on overprinting — and Hiroshima is among the small number of contemporary Japanese printmakers who sustain it as a primary medium. The subject extends the moonlight tradition that runs from Hiroshige's evening views through Yoshitoshi's late tsuki hyakushi to twentieth-century shin-hanga nocturnes, here translated into the continuous tonal language of intaglio rather than the flat planes of woodblock.