Iizaka Onsen

Iizaka Onsen depicts the hot spring resort town in Fukushima Prefecture, a subject Maekawa Senpan returned to repeatedly across his career. The print likely shows the bathhouse interior or the surrounding village, rendered with the broad, simplified planes of color and unfussy linework that became his signature within the sosaku-hanga movement. Senpan's onsen prints typically feature unidealized bathers — workers, country travelers, ordinary people unselfconsciously inhabiting communal spaces — captured with sympathy rather than the eroticism associated with earlier ukiyo-e bathhouse imagery. Working in the self-carved, self-printed sosaku-hanga manner, Senpan would have cut every block himself and pulled the impressions on washi using a baren, leaving visible the marks of the hand at every stage. The palette tends toward the muted earth tones and warm neutrals he favored over the saturated nishiki-e brilliance of the Edo tradition. The print belongs to his sustained documentation of Japanese onsen culture, a body of work that reframed an everyday social ritual as a worthy subject for the modern print.