Onsen

Onsen is one of Maekawa's signature subjects, a quiet interior scene set in a Japanese hot spring bath. He returned to the bathhouse repeatedly across his career, and these prints became among the most recognizable images of his oeuvre. The composition typically presents one or several nude bathers, often women, rendered with a rounded, unidealized treatment that emphasizes weight and warmth rather than erotic or classical beauty. Steam, tile, and water are suggested through broad areas of bokashi gradation, with figures outlined in soft keyblock lines that read as drawn rather than engraved. Maekawa's palette in these scenes runs to warm tans, muted pinks, soft greens, and pale blues, applied with visible baren texture across the surface of the washi. The subject reflects his lifelong interest in unguarded daily life and the dignity of ordinary bodies, an outlook closer to the humanist temper of European modernism than to the idealized bijin-ga of Edo-period ukiyo-e. The bathing prints helped establish Maekawa's reputation within the Nihon Hanga Kyokai exhibitions.