Reading

This second Reading composition from Ishikawa Toraji's 1934 Rajo Jusshu (Ten Types of Female Nudes) series offers a variant treatment of the absorbed-in-a-book motif that opens the set. The pose is likely altered — perhaps the figure reclining where the first Reading was seated, or oriented differently within the picture plane — allowing Ishikawa to study how the same activity reads under different bodily configurations. Reading as a subject for the female nude has its own European lineage, from Fragonard through nineteenth-century salon painting, and Ishikawa's adoption of the theme reflects his absorption of yoga conventions during his Tokyo Fine Arts School years. The print would have been carved across many blocks to render the modeled flesh, the book, and the surrounding interior, with bokashi used selectively to suggest soft interior lighting. Within shin-hanga, where Hashiguchi Goyo's clothed bijin-ga set the dominant standard for figure prints, Ishikawa's repeated nude studies marked an alternative path that drew more directly on European academic painting.