Silhouette of a Fisherman and a Child

A small color woodblock print from Suzuki Shōnen's early-1880s silhouette series, held by the Honolulu Museum of Art (James Michener Collection, acc. 19281). The print depicts a fisherman and a child in profile, rendered as a single dark silhouette against a faintly tinted ground. The composition is reduced to its essentials: the tilted pole of the fishing rod, the bent posture of the older man, the small upright body of the child at his side. Like the other prints in the series — the silhouette priest, the woman at the roadside, the man enjoying the scenery — the design draws on the same Shijō-school sketching tradition that Shōnen taught at the Kyoto Prefectural School of Painting but compresses it into the radical reduction of the silhouette technique. The series is an important early example of Meiji Kyoto print design before the [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) revival.