Minamoto no Kintada

This portrait of the Heian poet Minamoto no Kintada by Chobunsai Eishi is held by the Honolulu Museum of Art (accession 3039) and indexed through [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org. Kintada, a tenth-century courtier who appears in the Hyakunin Isshu and the Kokin Wakashu, is one of many classical poets whose likenesses Eishi rendered as part of his broader engagement with literary subjects. Such poet portraits sat alongside his Yoshiwara [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) as evidence of an unusual range, anchored in a career that began not in commercial printing but in orthodox Kano painting. Apprenticed to Kano Eisen'in Michinobu, Eishi served as a painter in attendance to the shogun Tokugawa Ieharu before turning to ukiyo-e in the 1780s, and the academic disciplines he absorbed in that earlier life, balanced composition, controlled contour, and an iconographic literacy regarding classical subjects, are visible in how he approached the rokkasen and Sanjurokkasen. The Kintada sheet uses the slender elongated figure and calm linear robe construction that became Eishi signatures, but redirected toward a Heian courtier rather than an Edo courtesan. The Honolulu Museum of Art holds an unusually deep group of these poet portraits by Eishi, and its record provides the authoritative documentation for series identification, publisher, dating, and physical condition. As an example of how Eishi extended his Kano-trained ukiyo-e into the literary portrait genre, the sheet is a useful counterweight to his better-known Yoshiwara work.