Leaf and Butterfly, Shôwa period, dated 1972

Dated 1972 and produced during the Shōwa period, this mezzotint revisits the pairing of a leaf and butterfly that recurs across Hamaguchi's body of work. By 1972 Hamaguchi had spent decades refining his command of color mezzotint technique, developed independently during his Paris years in the 1950s, and this work likely deploys multiple inked plates or selective inking to introduce chromatic variation into the subject's surfaces. The butterfly's wings, rendered by burnishing copper that had been uniformly roughened to a matte black, would display the graduated translucency Hamaguchi sought in all natural subjects. His compositions from this decade tend toward greater economy: fewer elements, more expansive dark grounds, and a studied tension between the precision of observed form and the atmospheric depth the mezzotint ground supplies. The 1972 date situates the work in a mature phase of his career, after his international reputation had been established through exhibitions in New York, Paris, and Tokyo.