Plants, Shuttlecock (Hanetsuki), and Clock (Wadokei) for Rokurokusai's Birthday and Longevity

Plants, Shuttlecock (Hanetsuki), and Clock (Wadokei) for Rokurokusai's Birthday and Longevity is a Keisai Eisen surimono in the Art Institute of Chicago, recorded with a date of 1800. The print is part of the cluster of sheets commissioned around the sixty-sixth birthday of the poet known as Rokurokusai, an event whose celebrants commissioned a series of emblematic prints from Eisen to circulate among their kyoka circle. Each surimono in the group condenses a different aspect of a long, well-lived life into an object portrait, and this one — combining seasonal plants, a New Year's shuttlecock and battledore, and a Japanese-style clock (wadokei) — is among the richest. The shuttlecock invokes the first days of the year and the games of childhood, the wadokei measures the unequal hours of the traditional Japanese day and signals the passage of time, and the plants set both inside a cycle of seasons. Eisen lays the objects out as a quiet still life, exploiting the formal vocabulary developed by Edo ukiyo-e surimono designers: cleanly drawn outlines, careful overlap, generous unprinted ground, and selective use of metallic pigments and blind embossing on the clock's brass face and the shuttlecock's feathers. Kyoka verses run across the upper field, anchoring the design in the playful sociability of the poetry circle. Although Eisen would later be celebrated as a designer of bijin-ga, his surimono show his fluency in the emblematic mode that the genre demanded. The Chicago impression survives as a finely preserved record of how Edo's literary patrons and ukiyo-e workshops cooperated on private occasions.