The Picture Scroll - repro

The Picture Scroll, marked here as a reproduction, is one of the twelve sheets in Keisai Eisen's shunga set known as 12 Shunga. The conceit is that the lovers are reading - or being shown - an erotic handscroll, a 'picture scroll' (emaki) of the kind that circulated in painted form in elite households and that the printed shunga book was in part designed to replace. The device folds a print of looking-at-shunga back into a piece of shunga, a layered, almost theatrical self-reference that Eisen liked. It also locates the encounter inside the literate, leisured space of an interior, with screens, bedding and the open scroll occupying the foreground. As with most of Eisen's shunga, the original sheets are now rare and the print preserved in the ukiyo-e.org archive (Eisen Keisai, 12 Shunga, The Picture Scroll repro) is from a later facsimile run. Stylistically the design uses the same elongated proportions, heavily patterned bedclothes and decisive contour drawing as Eisen's bijin-ga, applied to the explicit subject matter of the Edo ukiyo-e shunga tradition. The Picture Scroll is a useful sample of how Eisen, at the height of his career in the 1820s and 1830s, used metapictorial games - prints about other prints, prints about painting - to push shunga beyond simple depiction.