Morning

Part of the 1934 Rajo Junnshu (Ten Types of Female Nudes) published by Nakajima Jutaro, Morning depicts a female nude in an interior at the start of the day — a domestic genre scene in which the figure is shown waking, washing, or dressing. The subject allowed Ishikawa to work with the soft, raking light of dawn, translated to woodblock through extensive bokashi across the body and surrounding surfaces. Skin tones were built up through multiple impressions on washi, and the carver had to produce blocks capable of holding fine tonal transitions rather than the firm linear contours of traditional ukiyo-e. The print reflects Ishikawa's training in yoga at the Tokyo Fine Arts School and his unusual position within shin-hanga: while peers depicted clothed beauties in the bijin-ga lineage, he used the medium for an academic Western nude vocabulary, producing one of the small but distinctive bodies of figure work in the movement.