Topknot

The chonmage topknot was the traditional male hairstyle of samurai and townsmen through the Edo period and survives today only in the dressed hair of professional sumo wrestlers. The print likely presents a head or upper-body study of a figure wearing the hairstyle, possibly a rikishi. Hiratsuka's figural prints are less frequent than his landscapes and Buddhist subjects but display the same reductive treatment of form: black masses carved against the white of the washi, contour established by the cut rather than by drawn line. Such isolated figure studies echo the Edo okubi-e tradition of large-headed portraits while filtering it through the sosaku-hanga emphasis on the artist's direct hand. Where ukiyo-e portraits relied on the collaborative system of designer, carver, and printer, Hiratsuka's print carries the marks of his single intervention from initial drawing through final impression of the block onto washi.