New Year's card

A nengajo (New Year's card) print, a small-format genre that sosaku-hanga artists exchanged with friends, fellow printmakers, and collectors throughout the twentieth century. Ono produced nengajo regularly across his five-decade career, treating them as occasions for compact, self-contained compositions rather than ephemeral correspondence. As a member of the circle around Koshiro Onchi and Ichimoku-kai, he would have understood the nengajo tradition as one of the social rituals that knit the creative-print community together — Onchi himself produced dozens of New Year cards. These prints were typically pulled in small editions on washi using a hand-rubbed baren, with the design, carving, and printing all carried out by the artist in keeping with sosaku-hanga's sosaku-hanga-shugi (creative-print) principles. Without an image to confirm motif, the print likely incorporates zodiac, auspicious, or seasonal imagery appropriate to the receiving year.