Morning Hair 18/100

Morning Hair, numbered 18/100 and indexed through ukiyo-e.org from the Art of Japan archive, is another of Torii Kotondo's intimate shin-hanga bijin-ga that reframe a centuries-old ukiyo-e theme — the woman at her morning toilette — through the technical and aesthetic refinements of early Showa printmaking. Kotondo, born in 1900 and adopted as the seventh-generation head of the Torii school of kabuki signboard painters, devoted his print designing career to a small group of female subjects observed in the unguarded hours of dressing, bathing, and grooming. In Morning Hair the figure is caught with her tresses still loose, the disorder of just-woken hair carved into the block as a cascade of fine parallel cuts whose tonal weight depends on the printer's ink loading and impression pressure. Like Combing Hair and Long Undergarment, the image draws on the Torii school's hereditary precision of line while applying it to a body in repose rather than an actor in performance. Published as a numbered edition of one hundred — the deluxe production scale characteristic of shin-hanga publishers such as Ikeda — the print circulated to a collector base that valued the medium as a contemporary fine art rather than as theatrical advertising. Surviving impressions such as this one, catalogued through dealer archives and aggregated by ukiyo-e.org, allow Morning Hair to be studied alongside Kotondo's other major bijin designs as a coherent statement on the modern reinvention of Torii school bijin-ga within the shin-hanga movement.