Morning

A second impression of Morning from the 1934 Rajo Junnshu (Ten Types of Female Nudes). Differences between impressions of Ishikawa's prints reflect the artisanal nature of mokuhanga production at Nakajima Jutaro's workshop: pigments were ground and mixed by hand for each run, baren pressure varied across impressions, and the bokashi wiping of the woodblocks produced gradations that no two prints reproduced identically. Surviving impressions of Morning therefore show variation in the warmth of the dawn light across the figure, the depth of shadow modeling, and the saturation of background tones. The continued circulation of multiple impressions of Morning in private and institutional collections reflects the standing of the Rajo Junnshu series within the small body of nude figure work produced under shin-hanga, a subject other figure printmakers of the period — working within bijin-ga conventions — did not engage.