Fan, Mask of Monkey, and Hat

Fan, Mask of Monkey, and Hat is a Keisai Eisen surimono in the Art Institute of Chicago, with a recorded date of 1801. The composition belongs to the still-life branch of Edo ukiyo-e surimono, in which a few carefully chosen objects condense an entire iconographic field. Here the trio — a folding fan, a comic monkey mask of the kind worn in sarugaku and certain folk dances, and a wide-brimmed straw hat — gestures toward the New Year season, in which monkey performers and itinerant entertainers were a familiar street presence in Edo. Eisen arranges the objects with deceptive casualness: the fan rests partly open at the center, the mask leans against it with eyes turned slightly outward, and the hat sits behind both, its broad disk acting as a unifying element. The painter's pleasure in surface detail finds full expression in the mask, where pinks and reds describe a comic grin, while metallic pigments and embossing on the fan's ribs and the hat's straw weave provide the tactile contrast that surimono buyers expected. Kyoka verses distributed across the upper part of the sheet would have framed the scene as a poetic greeting from one Edo coterie to another, perhaps playing on the lucky associations of the monkey or on the figure of a dancer with hat and fan. Although Eisen is best known for his bijin-ga, his surimono show his fluency in the emblematic still-life mode that Edo poetry circles particularly prized. The Chicago impression survives as a quietly playful example of how late-Edo ukiyo-e turned an apparently random pile of objects into a fully meaningful image.