Ornamental cabbage

This print depicts hanakanran, the frilled ornamental cabbage cultivated in Japan as a winter garden plant, its rosette of crimped leaves prized as a cold-season substitute for flowering kacho-e subjects. Hiratsuka treats the plant frontally, almost diagrammatically, isolating the rosette as a self-contained composition and rendering the curling leaves through the rhythmic gouge marks that are his signature in sosaku-hanga. The contrast of dense black ink across the outer leaves against the white of the washi at the heart of the rosette would generate the central radial movement of the design. While Hiratsuka is principally remembered for his temple and Buddha prints, plant studies of this kind extend the kacho-e tradition into the sosaku-hanga vocabulary, where the artist's unmediated cutting of the block — rather than a designer's drawing transferred to a craftsman — remains visible in every contour.