Poetess and poem

Poetess and Poem is a Chobunsai Eishi sheet held by the Art Institute of Chicago (101067_526099) and indexed through ukiyo-e.org. The image pairs a female poet with the text of her waka in the traditional Sanjurokkasen format, a presentation that drew on a long history of poet portraits in Tosa, Kano, and Sumiyoshi school painting before it entered the world of nishiki-e. Eishi's engagement with female poet portraits is closely tied to his broader literary mitate practice. As a Kano-trained ukiyo-e designer who had apprenticed under Kano Eisen'in Michinobu and served as a painter in attendance on the shogun Tokugawa Ieharu, he was steeped in the iconographic conventions that governed how court poetesses had been depicted in painting, and he could translate those conventions into the visual language of Edo bijin-ga. The slender elongated figure, the long calm contour of the robes, the composed and aristocratic face that mark his Yoshiwara courtesans carry over with very little adjustment to the poet portraits, suggesting how directly his bijin-ga vocabulary and his classical figure work share a common Kano source. The Art Institute of Chicago record is the authoritative documentary anchor for series identification, publisher, signature, exact dating, and physical condition. The sheet illustrates how Eishi's Kano-trained eye produced a particular kind of poet portrait, one in which the visual idiom of the floating world and the visual idiom of court tradition turn out to be remarkably continuous.