Sample Books of Brocade Designs

Sample Books of Brocade Designs is a Keisai Eisen surimono in the Art Institute of Chicago, dated to 1801. The subject is unusual for ukiyo-e but characteristic of the genre's literary refinement: instead of figures, Eisen offers a quiet study of the printed and woven catalogs from which Edo dressmakers and textile dealers worked. Several bound volumes lie open and closed on a flat surface, their pages showing miniature swatches of nishiki — the brocaded silks that gave the surimono its title. Eisen draws each volume with care for the slight thickness of paper, the wrap of a fabric cover, and the printed grid through which textile patterns are sampled in tiny rectangles. The trick of the design lies in the printing: brocaded textiles inside the books are rendered with gold and silver pigments, blind embossing, and color gradations that mimic the physical experience of feeling and seeing real cloth. As a surimono, the print would have been distributed within an Edo poetry circle that included merchants, connoisseurs, and possibly textile professionals, with kyoka verses keyed to the sample books' implications of fashion, commerce, and seasonal display. Although Eisen's reputation rests largely on bijin-ga — his portraits of stylish women whose costumes were themselves inventories of contemporary taste — this sheet shows the textile fascination that underwrites those portraits. Without a single figure, it reduces the world of fashionable Edo to its raw material, and demonstrates how ukiyo-e designers and their poetry-circle patrons valued the quiet pleasure of looking at well-made things.