Morning Glories

Morning Glories is a Keisai Eisen design that combines bijin-ga with the seasonal iconography of asagao, the Japanese morning glory, a flower closely associated with summer in Edo and a popular subject of nineteenth-century horticulture, poetry, and prints. The morning glory's habit of opening in the early hours and fading by midday lent it a powerful metaphorical resonance for ukiyo-e designers, who linked the flower to themes of transience, freshness, and the brief perfection of youth. Eisen, working within Edo ukiyo-e in the same generation as Utagawa Kunisada and Utagawa Hiroshige, frequently paired his elongated bijin-ga figures with seasonal motifs, drawing on the long tradition that ran back to Kitagawa Utamaro's beauties with flowers. In this composition, the morning glory blossoms — often shown climbing a bamboo trellis or lattice frame — provide both a setting and a frame of reference for the figure, whose summer kimono and lighter palette would have echoed the lightness of the flower. The image is recorded in the ukiyo-e.org aggregated database, which compiles information from the Japanese Art Open Database and partner sources. As a study of summer bijin-ga, the print represents Eisen's continuing engagement with seasonal subjects and his ability to integrate floral iconography into the standard portrait format of Edo ukiyo-e.