Dyeing Shop

Dyeing Shop depicts the workspace of a textile dyer, a long-established Japanese craft (somemonoya) where lengths of fabric are dipped, hung, and dried after treatment with indigo or other pigments. Wada Sanzo's treatment of such artisan subjects typically frames the worker among the tools of the trade — vats, drying poles, bolts of cloth — with the dyed lengths themselves often providing the print's strongest color statement. The flat planar areas of mokuhanga are well suited to rendering blocks of dyed fabric, while finer keyblock work picks out the figure's apron, sleeve cords (tasuki), and the wrapped cloth on the dyer's head. [Bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations are commonly used in dyer subjects to suggest the wet, glistening quality of freshly treated cloth. The dyeing shop is among the traditional trades Wada documented alongside more modern occupations, and the print reflects his project of treating artisanal labor with the same observational seriousness as the painting subjects he learned at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts.