Kakemono of Monkey, Wine Cup and Potted Plants

Kakemono of Monkey, Wine Cup and Potted Plants, dated 1812 and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is an early Keisai Eisen print in the unusual vertical kakemono-e format — a tall, narrow sheet designed to imitate the hanging-scroll proportions of formal painting. The composition arranges a monkey, a wine cup, and an array of potted plants in a single vertical sequence, drawing on a mix of auspicious symbolism and humour. Monkeys in Edo iconography often signalled cleverness or playful disorder; wine cups invoked the pleasures of refined gathering; potted plants suggested cultivated leisure. By the time Eisen produced this print, kakemono-e were a recognised but specialised category, valued by collectors who wanted prints that mimicked the displayability of painted scrolls. The Met's holding records 1812 as the date, which places it relatively early in Eisen's career, before his major bijin-ga series and well before the Kisokaido landscape collaboration. The print's verticality and its allusive subject matter together draw on the surimono tradition of privately commissioned prints with literary or seasonal references, though kakemono-e were typically sold commercially rather than circulated privately. Eisen's design instincts here are closer to the Kano-school training of his youth than to the Yoshiwara-focused bijin-ga that would soon dominate his reputation. The print sits as a reminder of the breadth of his early practice, which included formats and subjects well outside the courtesan portrait for which he became best known.