Before the Mirror

Before the Mirror, showing a young geisha dressed in bright red underrobes with a tie-dyed collar, was the first and arguably the most highly cherished of all Itō Shinsui’s beauty prints. The woman, shown in profile, gazes intently at an unseen mirror to the right as she adjusts her hair with her left hand. This shin hanga (modern woodblock print) was Shinsui’s first collaboration with the publisher and gallery owner Watanabe Shōzaburō (1885–1962) and was originally intended for the foreign market and given an English title, The Scarlet Lady. Fortunately, that title was soon abandoned, though among Japanese print afficionados the nickname The Red Geisha is still heard. In the background, the rubbing lines created by the corner of a rubbing pad (baren) were intentionally emphasized to create textural contrast with the large flat blocks of red and black.

Watanabe had been eager to revive traditional print traditions and to promote young print artists. As for the publisher’s commissioning of this particular print, it is recorded that Watanabe had been impressed by a painting by the young Shinsui he had seen at an exhibition hosted at the studio of artist’s teacher, the Nihonga painter and shin hanga print artist Kaburaki Kiyokata (1878–1972); see, for instance, 2023.402). Watanabe commissioned Shinsui to make a print version of the painting, and the successful result led to a long-lasting and fruitful partnership between the publisher and fledgling artist.