Japanese Woodblock Print, 1934, this later edition, from the series Ten Types of Female Nudes with mica background

SIZE IN INCHES: 13.5 x 19.5 inches

ISHIKAWA TORAJI (1875-1964) was born in Kochi on the southwestern part of the island of Shikoku facing the Pacific Ocean. From the age of 17 he studied with Koyama Shotaro (1857-1916) at Fudosha, Koyama's Western-style art school. Toraji entered his paintings in the exhibitions of the Meiji Bijutsukai (Meiji Fine Arts Society), and he was one of the founders of the Taiheiyo Gakai (Pacific Western-style Art Society Institute) c. 1901, a successor to the Meiji Fine Arts Society. He traveled to the United States and Europe in the early 1900s, returning to Japan in 1904. He exhibited paintings at the Japanese government sponsored Bunten and Teiten, and at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915.

In 1943 he was inaugurated as the Head of Taiheiyo Bijutsu Gakko (Pacific Art School). In 1947 he joined the Shigenkai, a society to exhibit Western-style painting, as a founding member. In 1950 he became an adviser to Nitten (The Japan Fine Arts Exhibition.) He contributed significantly to art education at the Tokyo Koto Shihan Gakko (Tokyo Higher Normal School) and the Tokyo University of Education. He received the Imperial Award of the Japan Art Academy in 1953.

He is, perhaps, best known for his 1934-1935 woodblock series Ten Types of Female Nudes. In commenting on this series Merritt states "Ishikawa thought of himself as a yoga (Western-style) painter...but in this print [The Sound of a Bell] he abandoned himself with obvious pleasure to the flat pattern and decorative placement that were his birthright."

Fine, no flaws