Une Sieste

The title ("A Nap") points to a reclining female nude at rest, almost certainly modelled by Yuriko, the artist's wife and longstanding subject. The mezzotint medium suits such an intimate, motionless theme: a rocker raises a uniform burr across the copper plate that prints as the deep, velvety black surrounding the figure, while scraping and burnishing back to the polished metal produces the graduated tones of luminous flesh emerging from shadow. The horizontal recumbent nude is a recurrent compositional choice in Watanabe's mature output, drawing on a long European tradition descending from Giorgione and Titian and transposing it into his particular tonal register — slow, silent, and concerned almost exclusively with the play of soft light across skin. Like most of his figure work since the 1980s, the print favours stillness and contained intimacy over narrative or erotic incident, the body held in a near-monochrome field that flattens incidental detail and concentrates attention on volume and breath.