Riverside

A riverside scene rendered in mokuhanga, likely organized around the horizontal band of water that such compositions naturally suggest — a strip of river, a near bank, perhaps boats or buildings on the far side. Inagaki's handling of landscape favors broad, flat color planes over the carefully graded distances of nineteenth-century meisho-e; here the river would be carried as a single block of color, possibly with a narrow strip of bokashi along the bank to mark the meeting of land and water. The wood grain is often allowed to register through the lightest passages, a sosaku-hanga signature. Riverside imagery had a long history in Japanese print culture, from Hiroshige's Edo views forward, and Inagaki's version translates that subject into the modernist vocabulary of the creative-print movement: subject as armature for graphic structure rather than topographic record. It belongs to the small body of non-feline work in which he tested his reductive design instincts on the open landscape.