forgery / panel / painting / hanging scroll

This hanging scroll attributed to Chobunsai Eishi exemplifies the painted side of his career, the practice he turned to increasingly after retiring from commercial print publishing around 1800. Trained in the orthodox Kano school under Kano Eisen'in Michinobu before he gravitated toward Edo [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga), Eishi carried his Kano-trained [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) sensibility directly onto silk, producing one-of-a-kind paintings of beautiful women that were prized by samurai patrons and wealthy townspeople alike. The catalog entry preserved by ukiyo-e.org via the British Museum identifies this work as a panel painting in hanging scroll format and flags it as a forgery, meaning later imitators considered Eishi's painted bijin worth copying and passing off as his own. That fact is itself a measure of his stature: by the early nineteenth century, a painted Eishi figure carried enough cachet in the Edo market that fakes were a worthwhile enterprise. The image follows Eishi's signature formula of elongated, slender bijin posed with restrained gestures, robes falling in long unbroken curves, and faces drawn with the calm linear discipline he absorbed from Kano training. Even in a contested or copied state, the scroll preserves the visual grammar he developed for hanga and painting alike. The British Museum record and ukiyo-e.org reference offer the only verified documentation; viewers are pointed there for full provenance, accession data, and conservation notes rather than to speculative dating or biographical embellishment that the surviving record does not support.