Reading a Letter - repro

Reading a Letter, identified here as a reproduction, is one of the twelve sheets in Keisai Eisen's shunga set known as 12 Shunga. Letters - love letters, secret correspondence, exchanges between courtesan and patron - were a fundamental device of Edo erotic imagery, and shunga designers from Moronobu onward had used them to compress narrative, anticipation and consummation into a single sheet. Eisen's design positions a partly disrobed woman reading a letter as another figure approaches; the letter is opened across the foreground of the image, allowing the viewer to follow the social transaction that motivates the encounter. As with most of Eisen's shunga, the original sheets are now rare and the image preserved at ukiyo-e.org (Eisen Keisai, 12 Shunga, Reading a Letter repro) is from a later facsimile run. Stylistically the print is consistent with Eisen's mature Edo ukiyo-e: elongated bodies, heavy patterned bedding and a saturated palette built on indigo, black and vermillion. Eisen (1790-1848) is now regarded as one of the strongest shunga designers of his generation, and Reading a Letter is a useful sample of how he used the everyday object - a sheet of paper - as the hinge between the social and the erotic in a print tradition that took both registers entirely seriously.