At Onsen

The title places this print within Maekawa's body of hot spring scenes, a recurring strand of his output. Onsen prints typically depict bathers — often nude, often female, sometimes children — with a humor and unpretentious warmth that set Maekawa apart from contemporaries working in either the bijin-ga tradition or the wider sosaku-hanga circle. The image likely renders one or more figures relaxing in or beside a steaming bath, with simplified rounded contours, broad flat areas of skin tone, and economical knife strokes for facial features. The communal Japanese bath served Maekawa as a subject precisely because it was ordinary; it allowed him to study the human body in a setting unburdened by either eroticism or ceremony. As a sosaku-hanga printmaker he carved and printed his own blocks, lending his bathing figures a tactile, hand-made quality that distinguishes them from the polished surfaces of shin-hanga nudes by Itō Shinsui or Kobayakawa Kiyoshi. The print is consistent with Maekawa's lifelong interest in plain, unguarded moments of daily life.