Georgetown University, Washington D.C.

This print dates from Hiratsuka's American period, when he moved to Washington in 1962 and spent the remainder of his long life there, returning to Japan only periodically. The image depicts the Jesuit university's campus in the Georgetown neighborhood, likely focused on the Healy Hall complex with its Flemish Romanesque towers and steep slate roofs—architecture well suited to his planar black-and-white treatment. The encounter with American institutional architecture extended a documentary impulse that had previously yielded hundreds of Japanese temple and landscape prints; the carving vocabulary remained consistent across both subjects. Hiratsuka's late American work demonstrates that sōsaku-hanga, which he had championed since the 1920s as an artist-driven alternative to the workshop production of [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) and [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga), was a method portable across continents and motifs. The print belongs to a set of Washington-area subjects, including the National Cathedral, that he produced in the latter decades of a career spanning more than three thousand prints.