Combing hair - repro

Combing Hair is a Keisai Eisen design that appears in early twentieth-century reproductions drawn from one of the artist's privately published [shunga](/glossary/shunga) (erotic) albums of the 1820s. The original print belongs to a sequence of intimate domestic and bedroom scenes in which one figure attends to another's hair or toilette before or after a moment of intimacy. Within Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e), shunga were widely produced by leading [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) and [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e) designers, circulated as bound books or unbound sheets among urban patrons, and treated as a recognized branch of the woodblock-print trade alongside more public genres. Eisen contributed substantially to the shunga market, producing several illustrated books in the Bunsei and Tenpo eras, and his shunga style is closely related to his bijin-ga: the same elongated figures, careful patterning of kimono and bedding, and observation of interior furnishings recur in both. In the present composition, the act of combing through long black hair functions both as an everyday gesture and as an erotically charged motif drawn from a long iconographic tradition. The image is preserved as a documented reproduction in the ukiyo-e.org aggregated database, which collates information from the Japanese Art Open Database and other public sources. As a record of Eisen's shunga production, it complements his more openly circulated bijin-ga and provides context for understanding the full breadth of his work as a designer of figural subjects.