Happy New Year

A nenga-jo, or New Year's greeting print, produced for private exchange rather than commercial distribution. Hiratsuka Un'ichi made many such small-format prints over his long career, and they typically feature the zodiac animal of the coming year, an auspicious motif such as pine or plum, or a brief inscription set within his characteristic carved black-line vocabulary. The format suited the sosaku-hanga ethos of artist self-production: a single-block design, hand-carved and hand-printed in modest editions, sent directly from artist to recipient. Compared with his large architectural prints, these new year sheets show Hiratsuka working at intimate scale, often with a sparer composition and a more decorative emphasis. The numeric suffix in the title indicates this is one of multiple new year prints he produced, a reminder that Hiratsuka maintained the practice annually for decades, contributing to his total output of more than three thousand prints across an eight-decade career.