Horse

A third horse print from Nakayama's extensive equine output, again bearing only the generic title. By the time he had produced dozens of horse compositions, individual works were distinguished within his catalogue by edition number, dimensions, and visual content rather than by descriptive titles. This print likely presents another configuration of the animal — perhaps differing from horse-2 in pose, color register, or block count, since multi-block printing allowed Nakayama to introduce additional colors by carving and registering separate blocks for each pigment area. The technique of [nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e) color printing, descended from the eighteenth-century innovation of multi-block registration, remained the practical basis of postwar mokuhanga even as artists like Nakayama applied it to modernist rather than [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) subjects. The horse here would have been pulled in a small artist edition, signed and numbered in pencil — a [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) convention borrowed from Western print practice and distinguishing these works from the unsigned mass impressions of the Edo and Meiji commercial print trade. Together with his other horse prints, it forms part of the sustained equine project that defined his contribution to twentieth-century Japanese printmaking.