Nude With incense burner

This mokuhanga depicts a female nude posed with an incense burner (koro), a subject that places the print within the twentieth-century sōsaku-hanga tradition of treating the unclothed figure as a subject for woodblock printmaking — a departure from the clothed bijin-ga conventions of the Edo and Meiji periods. The pairing of the body with a ritual or domestic object such as a koro suggests an interest in stillness, contemplation, and tactile contrast between flesh, metal, and rising smoke. Such compositions typically rely on careful keyblock drawing for the contour of the figure, with bokashi gradations used to model volume and atmosphere around the smoke. Takasawa Keiichi's nudes circulate in the dealer market for modern hanga alongside other postwar printmakers who treated the female form as a recurring motif, and this sheet sits within a small group of his prints that combine the nude with quiet interior accessories rather than narrative or landscape settings.