Woman with a Red Tray

Woman with a Red Tray is a Japanese woodblock print by Hashiguchi Goyo, dated 1920 and produced in the artist's final year of activity before his early death in 1921 at age forty-one. Born in 1880 in Kagoshima, Goyo had trained in Western-style oil painting under Kuroda Seiki at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts before turning to Japanese painting, illustration, and finally to the small but extraordinarily refined body of self-published [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) that has secured his place as one of the most accomplished portraitists of the early [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) movement. The subject is a woman holding a red lacquer tray, presented in the close half- or three-quarter-length view that Goyo favored and aligned along the picture plane with the unhurried precision that defined his bijin-ga manner. The red tray functions both as a chromatic accent against the cooler tonalities of the sitter's skin and kimono and as a thematic anchor, identifying the figure with the domestic routines of food, drink, and hospitality. Goyo's prints from 1920 mark the apex of his self-publication, in which he personally supervised his carvers and printers and authorized small editions of remarkable technical refinement, including mica grounds, embossing, and unusual mineral pigments, that distinguished his sheets from the publisher-led shin-hanga output of contemporaries such as Ito Shinsui. As with his other late prints, Woman with a Red Tray exemplifies the meditative gaze, restrained palette, and meticulous attention to costume and accessory that have made him a touchstone of twentieth-century Japanese print connoisseurship. The impression discussed here is documented through the Artsy listing on the secondary market (https://www.artsy.net/artwork/hashiguchi-goyo-woman-with-a-red-tray), which preserves a record of the design under Hashiguchi Goyo's name.