Portrait of a woman

This portrait belongs to a recurring strand in Hiratsuka's prolific output — head-and-shoulders studies of women drawn from his immediate circle rather than the idealized bijin-ga subjects of the Edo tradition. As a foundational sosaku-hanga artist, Hiratsuka treated the portrait as a problem in carved relief rather than an exercise in flattering likeness: the face is reduced to broad planes of inked block contrasted against unprinted washi, with the contours of hair, brow, and jaw rendered as crisp incised white lines. He typically avoided the bokashi color gradations and refined polychromy of shin-hanga portraitists, preferring the graphic immediacy that black ink and white paper provide. Cutting his own block, applying ink with the brush, and pulling impressions himself with the baren, Hiratsuka achieved a directness that aligned with the movement's insistence on the artist's hand throughout the production process. Portraits of this kind sit alongside his temple, landscape, and bird subjects as a quieter, more intimate dimension of an output that ultimately exceeded 3,000 prints.