The Poetess Gishumon-in no Tango, from the series The Thirty-six Immortal Women Poets (Nishikizuri onna sanjurokkasen)

The Poetess Gishumon-in no Tango, from the series The Thirty-six Immortal Women Poets (Nishikizuri onna sanjurokkasen), held by the Art Institute of Chicago, is Chobunsai Eishi's sheet for Tango, the talented late Heian poet associated with Empress Gishumon-in. The series translates the canonical onna sanjurokkasen, a female counterpart to the better-known Thirty-six Immortal Poets, into nishikizuri (full-color brocade prints) with bijin-ga figures, and the title nishikizuri itself underlines the prestige of the project: this was high-end printmaking, designed to broadcast technical refinement as well as literary citation. Eishi's Tango is a contemporary beauty positioned in the slender, gently inclined posture characteristic of his mature manner, identified by a poem cartouche or attribute associated with the historical poet. The Art Institute of Chicago dates the sheet to circa 1795, near the peak of Eishi's printmaking career. As a Kano-trained ukiyo-e artist of samurai background, Eishi was the natural choice for a project that asked its designer to handle classical attribution with confidence; he had drawn on the rokkasen and onna sanjurokkasen as subjects throughout his career, and his ability to balance literary reference against fashionable elegance made him a leading exponent of the cultivated wing of Edo bijin-ga. The impression preserved by the Art Institute of Chicago, with its delicate color register and refined linework, allows the viewer to see how Eishi reconciled brocade-print luxury with the courtly poetic culture of late-Heian Japan.