Cape Uomi

Cape Uomi designates a stretch of coastline, marking this print as a meisho-e (famous-place view) rather than one of Inagaki's better-known animal subjects. Landscape compositions in sosaku-hanga often discarded the strict vantage points of nineteenth-century ukiyo-e in favor of broader, more graphic massings: a horizon held high, a headland flattened into a dark silhouette, water and sky carried in two or three superimposed bokashi gradations. Inagaki's training under Okada Saburosuke at the Hongo Institute of Painting had given him a Western painter's instinct for tonal balance, and his coastal prints typically translate that into restricted color blocks that read at a distance. Carved, inked and pulled by the artist, the print exemplifies the sosaku-hanga premise that every stage of production should remain in the hands of one maker, distinguishing it from the publisher-led shin-hanga landscapes produced by his contemporaries during the same decades.