Autumn

Autumn belongs to the seasonal bijin-ga that occupied much of Yamakawa Shuho's output, the title and accompanying autumn foliage indicating a female figure set against or among the changing leaves of the season. Shin-hanga designers commonly used seasonal markers — maple, ginkgo, susuki grass — to locate a sitter in a specific moment of the year, and Yamakawa's nihonga training gave him a careful eye for botanical accuracy in the carved and printed foliage. The composition likely pairs the warm reds and ochres of autumn leaves against the cooler tones of the woman's kimono, exploiting the chromatic possibilities of multi-block nishiki-e printing on absorbent washi. Bokashi gradations along the edges of leaves and sky would soften the transitions, while the keyblock carries the precise outline of the figure. Seasonal titles of this kind connect Yamakawa's bijin-ga to the older meisho-e tradition of place- and season-bound imagery, filtered through the shin-hanga aesthetic of refined modern portraiture published by Watanabe Shozaburo and the other shin-hanga publishers of the interwar decades.