Beauty standing beside morning glories

Dated c. 1814/17 by the Art Institute of Chicago and identified as the center sheet of an oban triptych — its right sheet held under a separate accession number — this print shows a single bijin standing beside trellised morning glories (asagao). The asagao was an enormously fashionable cultivar in Edo: a craze for breeding new varieties produced increasingly elaborate forms in the early nineteenth century, and morning-glory exhibitions drew large crowds. As a summer-dawn flower the asagao also carried elegiac associations of transience, a quality Eizan invokes by pairing it with an unhurried, contemplative female figure. Surviving as a center sheet, the print would originally have continued left and right into a fuller garden setting; the surviving panel alone makes a powerful focal image and is among the more frequently reproduced Eizan compositions in the Art Institute's collection.