Matsue (near Hiroshima)

"Matsue (near Hiroshima)" depicts Matsue, the castle city of Shimane Prefecture and Hiratsuka's birthplace, on the San'in coast west of the more familiar Hiroshima region. The parenthetical reflects a Western cataloguing convention to locate the city for foreign audiences. Matsue is bisected by Lake Shinji and the Ōhashi River, and its old quarters preserve samurai residences, the seventeenth-century black keep of Matsue Castle, and merchant streets along the canal. Hiratsuka, who left Matsue as a young man to study Western painting in Tokyo, returned often to its motifs throughout his career; views of the castle, lakeshores, and traditional houses recur in his work. The print likely renders its subject in his characteristic bold sumizuri-e: tile rooftops and timber walls cut as solid black masses, water and sky left as unprinted [washi](/glossary/washi), and architectural structure clarified rather than softened by the carving. As a [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) work, the sheet was designed, carved, and pulled by Hiratsuka himself, using a knife on the block and a [baren](/glossary/baren) to transfer the ink — each impression slightly different from its neighbors in the modest hand-pulled edition.