After bath- Yokugo — Yokugo

The Japanese bath—a deeply ritualized daily practice—provides the setting for this bijin-ga in which a woman steps from or prepares to enter the bath, her body partially revealed in the transitional state of after-bathing (yokugo). Shinsui's multiple prints of after-bath subjects—here subtitled "yokugo"—explore the body at its most unguarded and natural, freed from the elaborate architecture of formal kimono dressing. The subject had classical precedent in ukiyo-e but Shinsui's treatment is distinctively modern in its psychological directness.