Portrait of Santo Kyoden, the Master of Kyobashi

Portrait of Santō Kyōden, the Master of Kyōbashi, is an oban (large vertical format) color woodblock print designed by Rekisentei Eiri around 1795 and ranks among the most historically significant designs of his small surviving corpus. The sitter, Iwase Samuru (1761-1816), wrote and illustrated popular fiction under the pen name Santō Kyōden and had himself been a noted ukiyo-e designer in the 1780s under the name Kitao Masanobu. By the time Eiri portrayed him, Kyōden was operating a successful tobacconist's shop in the Kyōbashi district of Edo, the source of the print's epithet 'Master of Kyōbashi.' Eiri depicts him in half-length ōkubi-e (large-head) format, a genre then at its brief peak in the hands of Tōshūsai Sharaku and Kitagawa Utamaro, and the choice of an Edo writer and cultural figure as the subject of an ōkubi-e is unusual and pointed: it elevates the literary man to the same monumental scale ukiyo-e ordinarily reserved for kabuki actors and Yoshiwara courtesans. The portrait is carefully composed against a plain ground, with the figure's gaze directed slightly off-axis in the convention of intellectual portraiture. The print belongs to the small group of Kansei-era ōkubi-e portraits of contemporary cultural figures and stands as a vivid record of the literary culture of late-eighteenth-century Edo. Impressions are held by the Art Institute of Chicago and other major collections of late-Edo prints.