Still Life

Dated 1957 and executed in mezzotint on white wove paper, this work belongs to the productive mid-decade period when Hamaguchi was consolidating the technical and compositional approach that would define his mature practice. The title 'Still Life' without further specification suggests an arrangement of multiple objects—likely fruits, possibly with a vessel or cloth—rather than the single-subject format he also favored. Multiple-object still lifes required Hamaguchi to solve spatial problems absent from his single-subject works: overlapping forms, cast shadows, and the tonal relationships between differently colored or textured objects sharing a common ground plane. Each element would have been burnished separately from the uniformly roughened plate, with the relationship between adjacent tones established through careful incremental polishing. By 1957 Hamaguchi had acquired sufficient command of the rocking and burnishing sequence to manage complex arrangements with tonal consistency across the composition. The white wove paper support, standard for his intaglio work, provided the maximum tonal range between the unprinted paper white of the highest highlights and the unscraped plate tone of the deepest shadows.