Kabuki actor 1

Kabuki Actor 1 is a sheet from Keisai Eisen's series Beautiful Women for the 53 Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan-tsugi mitate bijin), an unusual project in which Eisen used the celebrated coastal highway between Edo and Kyoto as the armature for a set of bijin-ga rather than for landscapes. In a mitate (parody / analogy) print of this kind, the relationship between the named station and the figure is allusive rather than topographical: a courtesan, a geisha or - as here - an actor stands in for the station, with the station name functioning as a literary or theatrical pun. The figure is rendered with Eisen's mature Edo ukiyo-e mannerisms: elongated proportions, a heavily drawn outer robe, and a controlled use of vermillion against the deeper indigo and black of the costume. The sheet is reproduced from the ukiyo-e.org image archive (Eisen Keisai, Beautiful Women for the 53 Stations of the Tokaido, Kabuki actor 1). Mitate prints like this one illustrate the conceptual sophistication of late-Edo ukiyo-e: by 1830 the Tokaido was already so over-published as a straight landscape series that designers and publishers found commercial space only by inverting the conventions - replacing landscapes with beauties or with kabuki actors, and counting on viewers educated enough to follow the joke between station name and image.