Mother Getting a Kite Out of a Tree for her Child

Mother Getting a Kite Out of a Tree for her Child is one of Keisai Eisen's tender genre images of urban family life. Although Eisen (1790-1848) is best remembered for courtesans and Kisokaido landscapes, his bijin-ga repertoire extended to scenes of mothers and children that participated in a long ukiyo-e tradition reaching back through Utamaro and Eishi to Harunobu. The composition places the standing mother in the centre, robes pushed back as she reaches into the lower branches of a pine to free the snagged kite; the child looks up at her in anxious attention. Kites were a New Year's pastime closely associated with boys in Edo, so the print also belongs to the unstated calendar of seasonal images that ukiyo-e publishers issued each year. The figure is constructed with Eisen's mature bijin-ga mannerisms: a small head, elongated neck and the heavy, confidently drawn outer robe that anchors the composition. The image is reproduced from the ukiyo-e.org archive sourced from Art of Japan, with impressions of comparable Eisen mother-and-child sheets held in collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The print is a quietly important reminder that Edo ukiyo-e, even at its most fashion-conscious, was rooted in the everyday textures of city life and that bijin-ga was capable of warmth as well as glamour.