NO. 6

No. 6 is a numbered color woodblock print by Yoshijiro Urushibara, one of a sequence of works the artist produced after his long London residency, when he had returned to Japan in the late 1930s and resumed publishing under a slightly different framework than the Brangwyn-era prints. Urushibara had been one of the principal Japanese craftsmen to settle in Britain in the early twentieth century, where he combined traditional hanga workshop training with the design sensibilities of the Frank Brangwyn collaboration and the wider London Japanese woodblock circle that grew up around it. Numbered prints such as this one are typical of the later phase of his career, in which he often issued works as a portfolio or a loosely related group rather than naming them with literary or topographical titles. The composition is built from the same fundamentals that defined his earlier output: a balanced placement on the sheet, transparent layered pigments, careful reserved whites, and the visible woodgrain that Urushibara never tried to hide. Documentation of this impression survives through the ukiyo-e.org image archive, which preserves a record of the print as it appeared in the Japancoll source collection and links it to Urushibara's broader catalogue. Works in this numbered sequence are less frequently encountered than his celebrated European cityscapes and Brangwyn collaborations, and they offer a useful view of how Urushibara continued to refine his technique into the later part of his career, applying the same craft standards he had developed in London to the more modest publishing conditions of late-Showa Japan.