Untitled (hirezaki-eiho)

A nineteenth untitled bijin-ga by Hirezaki Eiho (1881–1968). The bijin-ga tradition in which Eiho worked had been central to Japanese printmaking since the seventeenth century, when masters such as Kaigetsudo and Torii Kiyonobu established the precedent of the beautiful woman as a primary subject for the woodblock medium. Eiho's place in this tradition is that of a late master who brought twentieth-century psychological awareness and nihonga painting technique to what had been, in its Edo origins, a more stylized and less individually characterized genre.