Bathing Women
入浴する女
- Date:
- c. 1930
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print
- Edition:
- Self-printed
Typical Price
Figure subjects represent some of Senpan's most collected works, and bathing women scenes carry particular appeal among sosaku-hanga enthusiasts. His bold, simplified forms and cheerful palette distinguish these from the more refined shin-hanga treatment of similar subjects. No posthumous editions exist. Expect $500-$1,500 for this type of figure composition.
Description
Women bathe — their figures rendered in Senpan's bold, direct sosaku-hanga style, the nude bodies depicted with the frankness that was a hallmark of his approach — in this circa-1930 outdoor bathing scene. Senpan's bathing women belong to a tradition of Japanese nude subjects that extends from ukiyo-e shunga through the early twentieth-century sosaku-hanga movement, but his versions are distinguished by their lack of erotic charge: these are women bathing, not women being looked at, their absorption in the act of cleansing creating a different kind of intimacy than decorative nudity.
