Cat in the Egyptian Museum in Vienna

The print depicts a feline figure — either a living cat among the displays or an Egyptian sculpture, possibly a Bastet bronze or seated stone form — set within the Egyptian and Near Eastern collection of Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum. The juxtaposition of a Japanese printmaker's eye and an ancient Egyptian artifact illustrates the cosmopolitan turn in postwar sosaku-hanga, when artists like Ono traveled and recorded foreign subjects with the same self-carved, self-printed discipline they had applied to Tokyo street scenes. The composition isolates the cat form against a flatter ground, exploiting mokuhanga's affinity for silhouette and reduced modeling. Ono's handling of dark tones — refined through decades of high-contrast urban prints — suited the matte stone and granite surfaces of museum sculpture, where bokashi could carry the slow tonal shift of stone in raking light. The subject sits within sosaku-hanga's intimate scale: a single observed object rather than the panoramic landscapes of shin-hanga. As both historian and practitioner of the movement, Ono treated such prints as personal records.