Horses in the Pasture (Hôba), Shôwa period, dated 1961

Horses in the Pasture (Hoba), dated 1961, is held in the Harvard Art Museums collection and catalogued there with the accession reference CARP06203 (accessible via ukiyo-e.org). The print is an early and important example of Tadashi Nakayama's signature subject and dates from the Showa period (1926-1989), the long era during which sosaku-hanga (creative print) flourished as Japan's leading modern printmaking movement. Nakayama (1927-2014) trained at Tokyo University of the Arts and built a career around the equine motif, producing several decades of horse and girl prints that combined woodblock printing with embossing, gold leaf, and finely tuned pigment layering. In Horses in the Pasture he shows multiple horses massed together in a soft, almost tapestry-like composition, the animals reduced to gently curved silhouettes and patterned coats arranged across the picture plane. The 1961 date places it among Nakayama's mature early works, when his style had moved away from any lingering academic naturalism toward the decorative, folk-inflected manner for which he is best known. The Harvard impression carries the museum's full provenance and conservation history, which makes it a particularly reliable reference image for collectors comparing edition states or condition. As an example of postwar sosaku-hanga, the work also illustrates the movement's commitment to the artist controlling every step of production, from design through carving and printing. For anyone tracing the development of Tadashi Nakayama's horse and girl prints, Horses in the Pasture is a useful anchor point, demonstrating how the subject that defined his international reputation was already fully formed at the start of the 1960s.