Velvet touch

The title points toward an intimate, tactile subject rather than a narrative or topographic one — likely a half-length female figure handling cloth, hair, or her own skin, in keeping with Yumeji's vocabulary of fabric and surface. His bijin tend to occupy shallow pictorial space, the figure pressed close to the picture plane and silhouetted against an indeterminate ground rather than placed within an architectural or landscape setting. The carving, produced posthumously from his original paintings and watercolors, favors a fluid contour line and broad areas of unbroken color over the dense baren-burnished overprinting of full nishiki-e. The result reads as much as illustration as woodblock print — a position Yumeji had occupied throughout his career as a magazine illustrator and book designer before these prints were issued, and one that distinguishes his work from the more technically elaborate bijin-ga of contemporaries such as Hashiguchi Goyo or Ito Shinsui.