In Front of the Mirror- repro

In Front of the Mirror, marked here as a reproduction, comes from a set of twelve [shunga](/glossary/shunga) (erotic prints) by Keisai Eisen. Shunga formed a major component of Eisen's output, as it did for almost every important Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) designer of his generation, and his erotic books are now regarded as among the finest of the late floating-world period. The composition uses the dressing-table mirror as a structural device: the woman's body, her loosened robe and the reflected fragments of her partner appear in the same plane, allowing Eisen to layer the act, the response and the social setting on a single sheet. Mirrors in Eisen's prints are never neutral; they multiply gazes and let the viewer move between the bodies and their self-presentation, a strategy that became one of his signatures. The reproduction status is significant: original shunga sheets by Eisen, censored under successive Tokugawa edicts and never publicly displayed, have survived primarily in private collections and have been reissued in modern facsimile portfolios since the late nineteenth century. The image preserved here at ukiyo-e.org (Eisen Keisai, 12 Shunga, In Front of the Mirror repro) is from one such facsimile run and is now the more commonly encountered form of the design. Stylistically the print displays the same elongated proportions, decisive contour drawing and saturated colour that mark Eisen's [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga), applied here to the explicit subject matter that the artist treated with characteristic seriousness within the Edo ukiyo-e tradition.