Nude

A nude figure study departs from the temple, shrine, and landscape subjects for which Tokuriki is principally remembered, placing this print within the more experimental [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) current that emerged in Japan from the 1910s onward. Sosaku-hanga ('creative prints') emphasized the artist as sole author—designer, carver, and printer—and embraced subjects such as life drawing, still life, and abstraction alongside traditional Japanese themes. Tokuriki, who studied at the Kyoto City Specialist School of Painting and was associated with both [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) and sosaku-hanga circles, occasionally produced figural works of this kind, in which the model is rendered with simplified contour lines characteristic of mokuhanga and tonal modulation achieved through careful registration of successive blocks. The print likely shows the figure in an interior or against a flat ground, the woodgrain potentially visible in broader passages where the [baren](/glossary/baren) has pressed pigment into the [washi](/glossary/washi). Such works document the cross-currents between Kyoto traditionalism and the modernist tendencies Tokuriki absorbed throughout his career.