Artist: Itō Shinsui 伊東深水 (1898–1972) Title: Suzumi 涼み — "Evening Cool" / "Cooling Off" Edition: Postwar impression from the Isetatsu blocks Date: c. 1940s–1960s - First Edition released 1925 Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga) on washi, Format: Horizontal ōban / approx. 37 × 26 Publisher: Isetatsu 伊勢辰 (Sōsaku Hangakai Isetatsu) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Paper & condition The colours are well preserved; the paper has taken on warm tones. The print still presents very well. Please check the images! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- About the print A young woman stands in profile, half turned away, in an indigo yukata scattered with morning glories. The whole design is built around what she is not showing you: the face is reduced to a single clean contour, and the eye goes instead to the nape of her neck, left bare above the collar. That exposed nape — unaji — was one of the few uncovered parts of a woman's body in traditional dress, and the most quietly charged. Shinsui puts a round uchiwa fan at her shoulder and a pale obi worked with thistles at her waist, and lets the flat blue of the cotton do the rest. It reads as heat, and as relief from it. Suzumi stands slightly apart from the rest of Shinsui's output. Nearly all his prints were made with Watanabe Shōzaburō; this one was issued by Isetatsu, the old Tokyo paper house, which handled only a small group of his designs in the mid-1920s. The printing is unusually rich for the format: mica laid into the obi, blind embossing in the white reserves of the yukata, and a grey ground deliberately printed to bring the woodgrain of the block through. Shinsui was twenty-seven when he drew it, already fifteen years into the career that would end with his designation as a Living National Treasure for the woodblock medium in 1952.