Lying nude

A reclining female nude, the figure laid horizontally across the sheet. The nude was an uncommon subject in shin-hanga, which more often handled the female figure through the bijin-ga lens of clothed beauty in a genre setting; reclining nudes appear more frequently in sōsaku-hanga and in prints that engaged the conventions of Western academic figure study transposed into mokuhanga. Compositionally, a print of this type generally fills the lateral axis of the sheet with the body, often against a flat color ground or simple drapery, and uses the keyblock to carry the contour of the figure while a small number of color blocks model the flesh and surrounding fabric. Bokashi gradations soften transitions where a Western painter would glaze. Within Kamei's wider output, predominantly landscape, a lying nude registers his work in the figural and studio-derived strand of mid-century print practice rather than the shrine, temple, and village views more typical of his hand.