Portrait of Onchi Koshiro

Portrait of Onchi Koshiro is a significant work by Jun'ichiro Sekino depicting Onchi Koshiro (1891-1955), widely recognized as the father of the sosaku-hanga (creative print) movement in Japan. This portrait is one of several variants that Sekino created of his mentor and the movement's spiritual leader, reflecting the deep personal and artistic connection between the two printmakers.

Onchi Koshiro was the driving force behind the sosaku-hanga ideal that artists should design, carve, and print their own works, rejecting the traditional division of labor in Japanese printmaking between designer, carver, and printer. As founder and leader of the Ichimoku-kai (First Thursday Society), Onchi mentored a generation of creative print artists including Sekino, organizing exhibitions and publications that promoted the movement both domestically and internationally. His own work ranged from lyrical abstractions to bold figurative prints.

Sekino's portrait captures Onchi with the direct, penetrating quality that characterizes his best portrait work. Sekino was renowned for his ability to convey personality and presence through the woodblock medium, and his portraits of fellow artists hold a special place in his oeuvre. The print employs his characteristic bold lines and carefully considered color relationships, rendered through the sosaku-hanga method that Onchi himself championed — the very technique used to create the portrait embodying the principles its subject spent a lifetime advancing.

This work holds particular art-historical significance as a document of the sosaku-hanga movement's internal relationships and as a tribute from one generation of creative printmakers to another. Sekino's multiple portrait versions of Onchi suggest an ongoing artistic dialogue with his subject, each iteration exploring different aspects of Onchi's character and presence. The portrait stands as both a personal homage and an important record of one of twentieth-century Japanese art's most influential figures, created by an artist who carried Onchi's creative vision forward into the postwar era and helped bring international recognition to the sosaku-hanga movement.