Apples

A still life subject rendered in Inagaki's reductive sosaku-hanga vocabulary. Apples in this idiom are typically shown as compact rounded silhouettes set against a flat tonal ground, the volume of each fruit suggested through a single shift in color rather than modeled shading. As a creative-print artist, Inagaki cut the blocks and pulled the impressions himself, and the texture of the washi and the directional grain of the woodblock become part of the image — the apple's surface carries the trace of the timber from which it was printed. The composition descends from the long Japanese tradition of still life in painting and printmaking, but stripped of the decorative impulse of nishiki-e and aligned instead with the graphic economy of European modernism that Inagaki absorbed during his earlier training in Western-style oil painting under Okada Saburosuke at the Hongo Institute. The print belongs to the body of non-cat subjects — fruits, flowers, landscapes — that ran in parallel with the feline imagery for which he is best known.