Woman Looking at a Mirror

This print was Itō Shinsui’s first collaboration with the publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō (1885–1962). Intended for the foreign market, it originally had an English title, The Scarlet Lady, although this hardly does justice to the artist’s skillful suggestion of the woman’s introspection by focusing her gaze on a mirror outside the frame. Many years later, Shinsui’s contemporary, the scholar Fujikake Shizuya (1881–1958), lauded this print for its “outstanding composition, ” “superior color distribution, ” “beauty of color tone, ” “lines that convey volume, ” and the artist’s “care not to bring the painting line into prints.” Notable, too, are deliberate rubbing lines in the background, executed with the corner of a rubbing pad (baren) to create textural tension against the large flat blocks of red and black.