Combing Hair

Combing Hair shows Terashima Shimei working within one of the most enduring motifs of Japanese woodblock printmaking, the woman attending to her hair. The subject reaches back through the Edo period to Utamaro and forward into the early twentieth century, where it was reclaimed by modern bijin-ga designers such as Hashiguchi Goyo and Ito Shinsui who saw in the mirror, the comb, and the loosened hair an opportunity to study a private moment with unusual intimacy. Terashima Shimei, a Meiji-Taisho woodblock artist who specialized in single-figure beauties, treats the subject with the spareness typical of his generation. The woman is shown in the act of combing, her arms drawing the line of her sleeve, the cascade of black hair providing the dominant compositional element. Black hair was a technical showpiece for Japanese woodblock printers: it required dense, even inking and precise registration to retain the gloss that distinguishes a well-pulled impression, and Terashima's design relies heavily on that effect. Negative space is allowed to surround the figure so that the hair, the comb, and the curve of the body remain unobstructed, a treatment that gives the sheet the quietness of an observed moment rather than the showiness of a court portrait. The print is documented through ukiyo-e.org, which preserves the record under both the Terajima and Terashima readings of the artist's name encountered in dealer holdings. As a meditation on a familiar bijin theme reworked for the modern era, the design distills what Meiji-Taisho woodblock artists prized in the genre: clarity of figure, restraint of setting, and respect for the physical craft of the woodblock itself.