Kikukawa Eizan

Kikukawa Eizan (1787-1867) was a leading bijin-ga master of the late Edo period, the founder of the Kikukawa school of ukiyo-e, and the teacher who shaped Keisai Eisen — the artist who would carry the Kikukawa bijin idiom into the Tenpo and Bakumatsu eras. Working in the immediate aftermath of Kitagawa Utamaro's death in 1806, Eizan inherited the bijin-ga genre at a moment when it was searching for a new direction, and he supplied one: a tall, elongated, almost willowy female figure with delicate features, refined fabrics, and an air of cultivated calm. For roughly two decades he dominated the market for prints of fashionable women in Edo, and his designs became the template that almost every successor — Eisen above all — would either extend or react against.

Eizan was born in Edo in 1787 (the fourth year of the Tenmei era) as Kikukawa Toshinobu, the son of Kikukawa Eiji, a fan painter and minor artist of the Kano school. His earliest training came from his father, who taught him the brushwork and pigment handling of the Kano tradition. He later studied painting with Suzuki Nanrei, a Shijo-school master, and supplemented his training by working in the shop of the textile dealer and amateur painter Hosokawa Sodo. This unusually mixed background — Kano discipline, Shijo naturalism, and a working familiarity with kimono patterns and textile design — gave Eizan a technical foundation that distinguished him from most of his ukiyo-e contemporaries, who were apprenticed directly into a printmaking lineage. The textile-shop exposure in particular shows up across his career in the precision with which he renders the patterns, gradations, and folds of his sitters' robes.

He began designing woodblock prints in the early years of the nineteenth century, drawing his initial visual vocabulary from Utamaro and from Chobunsai Eishi, the courtly bijin-ga specialist whose attenuated, aristocratic figures had been a quiet alternative to Utamaro's voluptuous beauties throughout the 1790s. Eizan synthesized the two: he kept the elegance and elongation of Eishi but added the engagement with contemporary fashion, popular series, and Yoshiwara subjects that Utamaro had perfected. By around 1804, his name was appearing on full-color oban prints from leading Edo publishers, and by the late Bunka era (roughly 1810-1818) he was the most prolific bijin-ga designer in the city.

The series that established Eizan's reputation are among the great late-Edo print projects. "Fashionable Six Jewel Rivers (Furyu Mu Tamagawa)" mapped the classical poetic theme of the six Tamagawa onto contemporary beauties; "Fashionable Eight Views of Edo (Furyu Edo hakkei)" and the later "Fashionable Eight Views of the Eastern Capital (Furyu Toto hakkei)" applied the Omi-hakkei convention to the city's own landmarks; "Fashionable Eight Views of Omi (Furyu Omi hakkei)" returned to the original eight scenes of Lake Biwa, each presented through a Yoshiwara courtesan or city woman. He produced parade-of-courtesans designs for Matsubaya, Tsuruya, and Chikiriya patrons; he made full-length pictures of named oiran with their child attendants; and in lighter mood he produced the "Fashionable Children as the Six Immortal Poets (Furyu kodakara rokkasen)," a charming conceit that recasts Ariwara no Narihira, Ono no Komachi, Sojo Henjo, Bunya no Yasuhide, Kisen Hoshi, and Otomo no Kuronushi as Edo children at play. Across all these projects he also designed surimono — privately commissioned prints with elaborate metallic printing — for poetry circles, demonstrating a luxury-end command of the medium that few of his contemporaries matched.