At a Hot Spring Inn

At a Hot Spring Inn is a Japanese woodblock print by Hashiguchi Goyo, dated 1920 and produced near the end of the artist's brief but decisive career as the most refined [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) master of the early [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) movement. Born in 1880 in Kagoshima, Goyo trained in Western-style oil painting under Kuroda Seiki at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts before turning to traditional Japanese painting and design, and then in the late 1910s to a small but extraordinarily refined body of self-published woodblock prints of beautiful women. The print's subject is a young woman captured in the intimate setting of a hot-spring inn, or onsen ryokan, an environment in which the daily routines of bathing, dressing, and undressing furnished a series of subjects to Japanese painting and printmaking from the Edo period onward. Goyo's bijin-ga treatment is characteristically restrained: the figure is observed at close range, in unhurried half- or three-quarter-length view, with attention to the precise turn of the head, the carriage of the shoulders, the fall of the yukata, and the play of light across hair and skin. The print typifies the late-period Goyo manner of self-publication, in which the artist personally directed his carvers and printers and produced editions of exquisite technical refinement, including mica grounds, embossing, and unusual mineral pigments. The 1920 date situates the print in the year before his early death in 1921 at age forty-one. The impression discussed here is documented through the Artsy listing on the secondary market (https://www.artsy.net/artwork/hashiguchi-goyo-at-a-hot-spring-inn), which preserves a record of the design under Hashiguchi Goyo's name.