Bottle with Lemon and Quarter Lemon

Bottle with Lemon and Quarter Lemon arranges three objects—a glass or ceramic bottle, a whole lemon, and a wedge cut from a second lemon—on an undefined dark surface. The cross-section of the quarter lemon introduces an interior view that contrasts with the sealed, opaque forms of the whole fruit and bottle. Hamaguchi exploited this structural contrast across many still-life mezzotints of the 1980s: the cut surface of a fruit reveals its fibrous interior and catches light differently than its rind. The bottle's curved glass surface provides an occasion to render reflective highlights, which in mezzotint are achieved by burnishing the plate to near-mirror smoothness. Executed in 1983, the print belongs to his most celebrated decade of still-life production.