Portrait of Empress Eishō

Portrait of Empress Eishō is an early-career official portrait by Araki Kanpo, painted around 1880 during the decade when he worked principally as a Meiji-period oil painter and produced commissions for the new institutional apparatus of the Meiji state. The work depicts Empress Eishō (1835-1897), the consort of Emperor Kōmei and the official empress dowager during the reign of her stepson Emperor Meiji, in the full court attire of the imperial house — the layered silk junihitoe (twelve-layered robe) that had been the formal court dress of imperial women since the Heian period, here depicted with the careful documentary attention to robe color sequence, sleeve depth, and accessories that an official Meiji court portrait required. The portrait stands at a particularly interesting moment in Kanpo's career, between his initial training in the Edo Nanga tradition under Araki Kankai (1810-1873) and his decisive return to nihonga in the late 1880s. In the early 1870s, with the dissolution of his Tosa-domain appointment after the Meiji Restoration, Kanpo had begun studying Western-style oil painting under Kawakami Tōgai (1828-1881), the British illustrator Charles Wirgman (1832-1891), and Kunisawa Shinkurō (1848-1877); the Eishō portrait belongs to this oil-painting decade and was one of a number of imperial commissions that placed him in the small circle of Meiji painters trusted with portraits of the imperial family. The original painting is preserved in the imperial collections under the care of the Imperial Household Agency (Kunaichō) and serves both as a state portrait of a major Meiji-era empress and as one of the principal surviving records of Kanpo's brief but consequential career as a Meiji oil painter.