The brine maidens

This Art Institute of Chicago horizontal oban, dated c. 1820s, depicts the brine maidens (shiokumi) — young women carrying buckets on yoke-poles down to the sea to gather brine for salt-making. The shiokumi subject had long been a poetic and theatrical motif in Japanese culture, evoking labor at the seashore, the smoky drama of salt-burning, and the famous Noh and kabuki narrative of the Suma exiles. Eizan rewrites the theme as a bijin-ga, dressing his brine maidens in fashionable robes and presenting them in graceful procession. The horizontal oban format is unusual within his oeuvre and allows him an extended landscape composition rather than the vertical portrait orientation that dominates his work. As a single-sheet horizontal it is also among the more painterly of his designs, with the procession of figures reading across the breadth of the sheet.