Yonen jidai no Sesshu (The Child Sesshu), from Ichimoku-shu (First Thursday Collection), Vol. 4

Yonen jidai no Sesshu (The Child Sesshu), a 1948 color woodblock print held at the British Museum, is the sheet that Yamaguchi Susumu contributed to volume 4 of the Ichimoku-shu (First Thursday Collection), the portfolio that the Ichimokukai produced through the postwar Showa years. The Ichimokukai had been founded in 1939 by Onchi Koshiro as a small private gathering of [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) artists who met monthly at Onchi's Tokyo home, and the Ichimoku-shu portfolios — hand-assembled, with each member contributing an original print — became one of the central documents of postwar Japanese creative printmaking. Yamaguchi's contribution to volume 4 departs from the strict mountain landscapes for which he is best known, treating the legendary Muromachi period painter Sesshu Toyo as a child in a composition that connects Yamaguchi to the longer Japanese tradition of ink landscape painting from which his own sosaku-hanga work derives. The print uses the saturated water-based pigment, dampened torinoko paper, and grain-exposed blocks that defined his mature signature style, and the figural subject is treated with the bold contour and chromatic discipline that contemporary critics likened to the French painter Georges Rouault. The British Museum impression preserves the layered registration and exposed woodgrain that distinguish strong sheets of his Ichimoku-shu work and that place him in the central postwar Showa creative-print circle alongside Onchi, Sekino Junichiro, and Yamaguchi Gen.