Man and Girl

This Metropolitan Museum of Art woodblock print, identified simply as Man and Girl, depicts a male figure with a young woman — likely a courtesan and her client or a more domestic pairing — in the intimate two-figure format that was a Kikukawa-school staple. The Met catalogues the work as a woodblock print in ink and color on paper. Eizan's two-figure compositions are among the most distinctive products of his middle career: by reducing the cast to two and bringing them into close vertical alignment, he achieves a kind of focused intimacy that the larger bijin-ga subjects, with their parades and crowds, cannot reach. The Met holds a number of Eizan two-figure works of this kind, and together they show how skillfully he could vary tone — from teasing to affectionate to melancholy — within a single restrained format.