Nude

A figure study in the European life-drawing tradition adapted to Japanese woodblock technique. Nudes appear sporadically in Hiratsuka's catalogue and reflect the sosaku-hanga movement's openness to subjects drawn from Western academic art rather than classical Japanese genre categories. The medium's binary of carved white surface against printed ink black suits the modeling of the body through contour and silhouette rather than tonal gradation. Hiratsuka would have cut directly into the block with his knife, the visible chisel marks functioning as his primary descriptive vocabulary. His early training in Western-style oil painting before turning to printmaking under Yamamoto Kanae shaped his comfort with this subject matter, which would have been alien to the bijin-ga tradition focused on clothed beauties of the pleasure quarters. The print belongs to a small but consistent thread of figure work running alongside his better-known architectural and landscape subjects, demonstrating the breadth that sosaku-hanga permitted its practitioners.