Sleeping Girl

A figure study of a young child in sleep, a subject that allowed sustained observational study without the formal demands of a sitting portrait. Sleeping figures had an established place in Western academic painting, and Nakazawa, through his training under Kuroda Seiki, would have been familiar with the genre via European art that circulated in Meiji-era Japan in the form of reproductions, study materials, and the curriculum of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. The subject also has Japanese precedents in genre painting of children and in the kuchi-e (frontispiece) print tradition that flourished in literary magazines around the turn of the twentieth century. As a woodblock work, the print would render the relaxed pose and closed eyes through modulated tonal areas rather than the firm outlines of earlier ukiyo-e figure prints. The intimacy of the subject—the close viewpoint, the absence of action—aligns with the introspective tendencies of sosaku-hanga, which favored personal expression over the publicly oriented actor and beauty subjects of nineteenth-century commercial printmaking.