Ten Types of Female Nudes (Rajo jusshu)
Rajo jusshu
About This Series
Ishikawa Toraji's Ten Types of Female Nudes (Rajo jusshu), issued in 1934-1935, is the artist's central woodblock project and one of the most ambitious engagements with the nude in twentieth-century Japanese printmaking. Ishikawa Toraji (1875-1964) had trained as a yoga (Western-style oil) painter at the Hakubakai under Kuroda Seiki and had spent extended periods in Europe and the Americas during the 1900s and 1910s, returning to Tokyo with a cosmopolitan visual vocabulary that distinguished him from the home-trained majority of his Bunten and Teiten contemporaries. His move into the woodblock in his late fifties belongs to the wider migration of yoga painters into the print medium that produced parallel cycles by Ishii Hakutei, Yamamura Toyonari, and others, and the Ten Types of Female Nudes was self-published in deluxe editions with the carving by Maeda Kentaro and the printing by Komatsu Wasakichi. The ten compositions place each nude within a domestic Western interior populated with the screens, rugs, fans, ceramics, and decorative items of the cosmopolitan Tokyo bourgeois household, and the series can be read simultaneously as a study of the female form in the academic mode and as a documentary of the visual culture of the prosperous interwar Tokyo apartment. The figures are drawn with the firm modelled contour of Toraji's oil practice translated into the flat graduated color of the print medium, with selective use of gauffrage to register the textures of carpet and upholstery. The series occasioned a brief moral controversy at the time of issue, in keeping with the still-conservative reception of the nude in mid-1930s Japan, and was subsequently received as one of the supreme statements of the yoga-hanga cycle. Complete sets are uncommon and impressions are held in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Tokyo National Museum, where the project figures prominently in modern accounts of 1930s Japanese print culture.
Prints in This Series (11)
Frequently Asked Questions
Ishikawa Toraji's Ten Types of Female Nudes (Rajo jusshu), issued in 1934-1935, is the artist's central woodblock project and one of the most ambitious engagements with the nude in twentieth-century Japanese printmaking. Ishikawa Toraji (1875-1964) had trained as a yoga (Western-style oil) painter at the Hakubakai under Kuroda Seiki and had spent extended periods in Europe and the Americas during the 1900s and 1910s, returning to Tokyo with a cosmopolitan visual vocabulary that distinguished him from the home-trained majority of his Bunten and Teiten contemporaries. His move into the woodblock in his late fifties belongs to the wider migration of yoga painters into the print medium that produced parallel cycles by Ishii Hakutei, Yamamura Toyonari, and others, and the Ten Types of Female Nudes was self-published in deluxe editions with the carving by Maeda Kentaro and the printing by Komatsu Wasakichi. The ten compositions place each nude within a domestic Western interior populated with the screens, rugs, fans, ceramics, and decorative items of the cosmopolitan Tokyo bourgeois household, and the series can be read simultaneously as a study of the female form in the academic mode and as a documentary of the visual culture of the prosperous interwar Tokyo apartment. The figures are drawn with the firm modelled contour of Toraji's oil practice translated into the flat graduated color of the print medium, with selective use of gauffrage to register the textures of carpet and upholstery. The series occasioned a brief moral controversy at the time of issue, in keeping with the still-conservative reception of the nude in mid-1930s Japan, and was subsequently received as one of the supreme statements of the yoga-hanga cycle. Complete sets are uncommon and impressions are held in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Tokyo National Museum, where the project figures prominently in modern accounts of 1930s Japanese print culture.
The Ten Types of Female Nudes (Rajo jusshu) series contains 4 prints, created by Ishikawa Toraji.
The Ten Types of Female Nudes (Rajo jusshu) series was created by Ishikawa Toraji (石川寅治).
We currently have 11 of 4 known prints from the Ten Types of Female Nudes (Rajo jusshu) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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