Holy Family

A Christian subject—the Holy Family of Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus—an unusual entry in Hiratsuka's catalogue that points to the breadth of subject matter the sosaku-hanga movement embraced. Christian themes appear occasionally in twentieth-century Japanese printmaking, often produced for a small but identifiable Catholic and Protestant audience or in dialogue with European devotional imagery. Hiratsuka's treatment would translate the iconography into his characteristic black-line woodcut idiom, where figures emerge from carved white planes set against dense ink-black backgrounds. The visual economy of his style—rejecting the polychromy of nishiki-e in favor of a near-monochrome surface—shares formal common ground with European medieval and Renaissance woodcut prints depicting the same subject, a parallel Hiratsuka would have been aware of through his Western art training. The print reflects sosaku-hanga's repositioning of the woodblock medium as a vehicle for individual artistic expression untethered to traditional Japanese subject hierarchies, capable of accommodating religious subjects from outside the Buddhist and Shinto canon that otherwise dominate his output.