Early Summer Bath, from the series “Twelve Images of Modern Beauties”

The woman depicted here is kneeling in a bathhouse; the red flush of her face and fingertips indicates that she must have just emerged from the water. During the Edo period (1615–1868) many prints depicted a woman after her bath and Itô Shinsui modernized the subject by treating it more realistically, as if he had sketched from life.Layers of color compose the background and her hair while the contour lines of her body were blind-printed (stamped with ink-free blocks). The swirling lines of the background that extend over her body were made with the edge of a baren, a disk-shaped tool used to rub the paper upon the printing blocks.