Bathers

Bathers, executed by Onchi Koshiro in 1915, is an early and exceptionally significant work that documents the artist's pivotal contribution to the founding moment of sosaku-hanga (creative print) in Japan. Produced when Onchi was only in his mid-twenties, the print belongs to the Tsukuhae (Moonglow) circle, the short-lived but historically decisive magazine he edited with the poet-printmaker Tanaka Kyokichi and Fujimori Shizuo between 1914 and 1915. In Bathers, Onchi depicts figures at water in a language that owes as much to European Post-Impressionist and Symbolist book illustration — particularly the lyrical figural prints of Edvard Munch and the Vienna Secession — as it does to Japanese woodblock tradition. Bodies are simplified into broad, lightly carved planes; the bathing scene becomes less an anecdote than a meditation on figure, light, and water. The print embodies the foundational sosaku-hanga claim, then radical against the publisher-dominated production model of late Meiji and Taisho ukiyo-e: that the artist alone should design, carve, and print each work as a complete personal statement. Onchi had absorbed this principle from Yamamoto Kanae's 1904 Fisherman and from his own studies in Western art at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and the Tsukuhae prints — Bathers among them — translated it into a fully realized practice. Although no major museum source is listed for this exact impression in the present documentation, the print can be located through ukiyo-e.org's database of Onchi material (https://ukiyo-e.org/search?q=onchi+bathers), where comparison with his other Tsukuhae-era work clarifies its place at the very beginning of his career. For students of Onchi Koshiro and of sosaku-hanga as a movement, Bathers is a touchstone: it shows the future leader of Japanese abstract printmaking already insisting, in 1915, that woodblock could be a vehicle for serious modernist expression rather than reproductive craft, an insistence that would shape Japanese printmaking for the next half-century.