Wild red poppy

A botanical subject treated in Inagaki's sosaku-hanga manner rather than in the tradition of classical kacho-e. The wild red poppy (hinageshi) is a single-stem flower with a fragile, papery blossom, and Inagaki would have used the woodblock to push that blossom into a saturated vermillion plane that anchors the composition. Stem and leaves typically resolve into thin black contours and flat green-black masses, with the ground left as exposed washi or filled with a pale tone. Where Edo-period bird-and-flower prints layered fine line work and gradation to convey the soft physicality of petals, Inagaki's approach is more graphic: a few decisive shapes, an emphatic color, and visible woodgrain from the baren impression. The print belongs to the strand of his work alongside the apples, persimmons, and other natural subjects that ran parallel to the cats. It demonstrates that the same reductive vocabulary he applied to feline silhouettes carried equally well into floral composition.