Woman in Chignon

Woman in Chignon is a Japanese woodblock print by Ito Shinsui, dated 1924 and produced as one of the early [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) designs in the artist's celebrated Watanabe-published career. Born in Tokyo in 1898, Shinsui studied nihonga painting under Kaburagi Kiyokata and emerged in the 1910s as one of the principal new-print, or [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga), bijin-ga designers working with the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo. Across more than five decades he produced an exceptionally refined body of woodblock prints of young women, sustaining the bijin-ga tradition into the twentieth century while shaping it through a modern eye for psychology, costume, and seasonal mood. The subject of this print is a young woman whose elaborate chignon hairstyle, the shimada or other formal coiffure suggested by the title, identifies her with the world of refined urban dress that the bijin-ga tradition long celebrated. The composition typically presents the figure in close half- or three-quarter-length view, the head tilted at a precisely calculated angle to register both the silhouette of the hairstyle and the inward gaze of the sitter, with attention to the kimono collar, hairpins, and skin tones that the carvers and printers of the Watanabe studio could reproduce with unmatched delicacy. The 1924 date situates the print near the start of Shinsui's mature bijin-ga production for Watanabe, in the early years after the destruction of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 disrupted but did not halt the city's print industry. The impression discussed here is documented through the Artsy listing on the secondary market (https://www.artsy.net/artwork/ito-shinsui-woman-in-chignon), which preserves a record of the design under the artist's name.