Thinking of the Coming Spring, from the series "New Twelve Images of Modern Beauties"

Thinking of the Coming Spring is a 1918 woodblock print by Ito Shinsui from his series New Twelve Images of Modern Beauties (Shin bijin junisugata), held in the Art Institute of Chicago. The series is one of the foundational projects of twentieth-century bijin-ga and a touchstone of the entire shin-hanga movement that publisher Watanabe Shozaburo built around Ito Shinsui from the mid-1910s onward. Each image presents a single contemporary Japanese woman in a moment of contained inwardness, dressed in modern but traditional clothing and rendered with the soft linework and tonal grading that became Shinsui's bijin-ga signature. In Thinking of the Coming Spring, the figure is suspended in the kind of quiet anticipation the title names, her face and posture carrying the entire emotional charge of the sheet. Where late Edo ukiyo-e bijin-ga had emphasized fashion display and the public roles of the women of the licensed quarters, Shinsui's modern beauties are private, interior, and middle-class in their visual register. The shin-hanga production model, in which artist, carver, and printer worked separately under Watanabe's direction, allowed the Twelve Images series to achieve subtle skin tones, delicate fabric patterns, and atmospheric backgrounds that would have been impossible in commercial Edo-period printing. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves several sheets from the series and catalogues this one as artwork no. 35358. The print is widely cited in scholarship on Ito Shinsui as the moment his mature bijin-ga manner crystallised.