Riverbank

A landscape composition treating the meeting of water and land as a problem of horizontal bands and silhouette. Inagaki approached meisho-e tradition obliquely: rather than a named view, the title describes a generic riparian setting, allowing the artist to pursue formal rather than topographical interests. The print likely organizes its space into stacked color fields — water, bank, and sky — with vegetation or a single figure breaking the horizontal divisions. Bokashi gradients along the water's edge would soften the transition between zones while retaining the print's overall flatness. Inagaki's landscapes share with his cat prints a preference for two or three blocks doing the work of many, achieved through careful selection of color and confident block-cutting rather than chromatic accumulation. The piece sits within the postwar sosaku-hanga turn toward Japanese subjects rendered in a vocabulary intelligible to international collectors, who acquired such prints through dealers like the Red Lantern Shop and through exhibitions at venues including the Sao Paulo and Lugano biennials.