Eishōsai Chōki

Eishōsai Chōki (栄松斎長喜, active circa 1786–1808) was a Japanese ukiyo-e designer whose small but exquisite oeuvre — perhaps 100 securely attributed designs — places him among the most refined bijin-ga artists of the late Edo period. Working in the immediate orbit of Kitagawa Utamaro, Chōki produced courtesan portraits and floating-world genre scenes whose elegance of line, sensitivity of expression, and economy of pattern have given his finest prints a quiet, durable reputation. Modern cataloguers have ranked his best designs with those of Utamaro himself.

The biographical record for Chōki is thin even by the standards of an ukiyo-e generation whose private lives are largely lost. His birth and death dates are not recorded; his given name appears in some sources as Momokawa Chōki (百川長喜), suggesting an association with the Momokawa Shikō painting lineage, but the attribution is uncertain. What is reliably known is that he studied with Toriyama Sekien (1712–1788), the Kanō-trained painter best remembered for his illustrated bestiaries of supernatural creatures (the Gazu Hyakki Yagyō). Sekien also trained Kitagawa Utamaro, so Chōki entered the ukiyo-e world as a near-contemporary of the artist who would dominate the bijin-ga genre for the next two decades. Where Utamaro emerged as a public figure of national reach, Chōki worked more quietly across roughly two decades from the mid-1780s to the first years of the nineteenth century.

Chōki signed his prints under several names. Eishōsai Chōki (栄松斎長喜) is the form that appears most often on his mature work and is the standard reference; he also signed simply Chōki (長喜), and the variant Shikō (子興) appears on a smaller group of works, particularly on certain bird-and-flower prints and on some of his earlier output. The shifting signatures have occasionally caused attribution puzzles, and some prints once given to Shikō are now considered the work of the same hand at an earlier date.

Stylistically, Chōki belongs to the generation that took up the okubi-e — the close-up bust portrait, often set against a plain or mica-dusted ground — that Utamaro brought to commercial prominence in the early 1790s. Chōki's portraits of named Yoshiwara courtesans, with their long oval faces, delicately curving necks, and small precisely painted mouths, follow Utamaro's lead while developing a distinct quietness. Where Utamaro's faces project a sensual warmth and Chōkōsai Eishō's tend toward a linear, almost graphic chill, Chōki's bijin sit between the two: more inward than Utamaro's, more affectionate than Eishō's, often with the suggestion of a half-completed gesture or momentary turn of the head that gives the image a felt sense of interior life. His palette is restrained — soft grey-blues, muted reds, warm greys — and his line is among the most refined in late-Edo printmaking.

Chōki's full-length bijin-ga and multi-figure genre compositions are equally accomplished. The celebrated Niwaka Festival series depicts Yoshiwara geisha performing the binzasara clapper-dance and other traditional acts during the annual autumn festival in the licensed quarter. His pentaptych of geisha on an evening boat ride on the Sumida (the Suzumi-bune or 'cooling-off boat' series), preserved in part at the Met, is one of the most expansive compositions of the period. Genre scenes such as Catching Fireflies and Moon Viewing place named beauties in seasonal settings that connect the celebrity-portrait mode to the kachō-fūgetsu tradition of seasonal poetic image-making. His Cock Fight pairing of Naniwaya Okita and Takashimaya Ohisa is one of the iconic Kansei celebrity portraits, and Osumi, a Tayū of the Tsuchiya in Shinmachi extends his reach to the Osaka pleasure quarters as well.