Shinsui Ito - After the Bath (浴後)

A young woman, just out of the bath, crouches before a wooden pail in a summer robe patterned with indigo cross-shapes and large blotted roundels. Shinsui Ito strips the scene down to almost nothing: the figure, the pail, a speckled soap dish holding a cake of soap, and two long diagonal shadows crossing an otherwise bare ground. Everything rests on the quiet weight of one ordinary gesture.

The authentication evidence sits in plain sight on the sheet. The artist signature and the red seal are cut into the block itself and printed at the mid-right of the image, just above the soap dish, so they are part of the impression rather than added afterwards. Along the left margin, outside the printed field, the workshop record survives in pencil: the title at the top, and lower down the edition line together with the names of the block carver and the printer who realised the design. A comparable impression of this composition sold at auction in Japan credits the carver Okura Hanbei and the printer Nakajo, which matches the hands named here. The sheet keeps its full deckled edges of handmade Japanese paper on all four sides, and the verso is clean and unbacked, with the image showing through only faintly.

It is presented in a wood moulding over a beige silk mat, with a green backing board and a hanging cord. The storage set has stayed with the print: a navy crepe-paper portfolio cover with the artist name brushed in silver above a small vermilion seal, the printed folder with its title slip, a yellow cloth wrapper, a fitted flat case with a cloth-covered lid and cord fastenings, and the original shipping carton, together with a pamphlet on the artist. The case and carton carry age spotting from long storage, which is exactly what has kept the sheet inside them in the state described.

Shinsui Ito entered the studio of Kaburagi Kiyokata at the age of thirteen and was given the art name Shinsui. Invited by the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo, he cut his first woodblock design in 1916 and went on to become the defining figure of beauty prints within the shin-hanga movement, alongside Kawase Hasui. He received the Japan Art Academy Prize in 1948 and was elected to the Academy in 1958. His work is held by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and the Yamatane Museum of Art.