Hair

Hair depicts a figure study centered on the act of grooming or arranging hair, a subject Nagase returned to repeatedly across his long career. Working within the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) (creative print) tradition he helped establish, Nagase would have personally designed, carved, and printed this mokuhanga rather than dividing the labor among specialists as in the older [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) workshop system. Where Edo-period [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) rendered hair through fine, regular keylines and lustrous black inking, Nagase's training in Western painting and sculpture typically pushed him toward more expressive carving, with cuts that show the gesture of the chisel and tonal areas built up through textured [baren](/glossary/baren) rubbing on [washi](/glossary/washi). The intimate domestic motif aligns with the sosaku-hanga ambition to elevate everyday subjects to fine-art status, and reflects the figural concerns Nagase cultivated through his nihonga and life-drawing studies before he turned to printmaking and authored his 1922 instructional manual.