Unknown, horse 1- LE

This limited edition print belongs to the long-running equine series that made Tadashi Nakayama one of the most beloved figures of the postwar sosaku-hanga (creative print) movement. Catalogued through ukiyo-e.org from a print database listing, the work shows Nakayama's signature approach to horse and girl prints: a sweetly stylized horse rendered with the soft, almost folk-art geometry he developed across decades of variations on this subject. Nakayama (1927-2014) belonged to the generation of Japanese printmakers who took the sosaku-hanga ideals of self-drawing, self-carving, and self-printing and turned them toward intimate, decorative, sometimes dreamlike imagery rather than the landscape and figure traditions favored by earlier shin-hanga publishers. His horses, sometimes paired with young girls, sometimes standing alone in pastures or against patterned backgrounds, became his most recognizable theme. The animal here is built from gently curved contours and patches of textured color, with the gilding, embossing, and layered pigments that Nakayama often combined with woodblock printing to give his editions a hand-finished, almost lacquered surface. As a limited edition piece, it would have been issued in a small numbered run, signed and stamped by the artist in pencil along the bottom margin. Collectors prize these horse prints both for Nakayama's craftsmanship and for the way they sit at the meeting point of modern Japanese graphic design and the older mingei (folk craft) sensibility. Because the title is generic and no firm date is recorded, this image is best understood as part of the broader family of Nakayama's Tadashi Nakayama horse and girl prints rather than a specific named edition, and it offers an approachable entry point into the artist's distinctive sosaku-hanga style.