Standing nude

Figural nude studies are uncommon but not absent from Hiratsuka's output, reflecting his early training in Western-style painting before he committed fully to mokuhanga in the 1910s and 1920s. The print likely renders a single standing figure in his reductive black-and-white idiom, the body's contour defined by carved silhouette rather than by modeled tonal shading. The subject places the work within sosaku-hanga's broader engagement with European figural conventions—Onchi Kōshirō and other movement contemporaries similarly produced occasional nudes alongside their landscape and abstract work. Hiratsuka's treatment translates the academic life-drawing tradition into the language of woodblock cutting, where the chisel's mark and the resistance of the washi shape how form is registered. As in all his mature work, the entire process from drawing through carving to printing was performed by the artist himself, in keeping with the founding principles of the creative print movement.