Pomegranate in Fruit Dish

This mezzotint on white wove paper extends Hamaguchi's still-life practice beyond the spare single-object format to include a supporting vessel. The fruit dish introduces a secondary form—bowl or plate—that creates a shallow spatial relationship between container and fruit, situating the pomegranate within a domestic register while keeping the overall composition tightly focused. The pomegranate's distinctive crown and rough exterior skin, with its leathery texture contrasting the smoother ceramic of the dish, provided Hamaguchi with two different surface qualities to render through the same burnishing process. The mezzotint ground unifies both surfaces under a common light source while allowing the textural differentiation to read clearly. Pomegranates appear less frequently in Hamaguchi's catalog than cherries or lemons, making this work a relative rarity among his fruit subjects. The fruit's cultural associations—fertility, abundance, autumn—may have interested him, though Hamaguchi rarely made iconographic statements explicit, preferring the object to speak through its formal qualities rather than symbolic freight.