The Chofu Jewel River in Musashi Province

The Chōfu Jewel River in Musashi Province, from the Six Jewel Rivers series (Mu Tamagawa), is an [aiban](/glossary/aiban) (medium vertical format) color woodblock print by Rekisentei Eiri of around 1785. The Tamagawa of Chōfu, in Musashi Province near Edo, is associated in classical waka with the women who beat their woven hemp cloth on its banks — the so-called 'fulling-block' (kinuta) motif that recurs throughout Heian and medieval Japanese poetry. Eiri here translates that ancient image into late-Edo [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga): a tall, gracefully attenuated beauty handles a length of patterned cloth, her body bent in the soft S-curve characteristic of the Chōbunsai figural canon. The composition's palette of pale silvers, muted plums, and ivory-tone fabric typifies the school's restrained chromatic register, and the aiban format produces a narrow, elongated picture-space that emphasizes the figure's verticality. The print exemplifies Eiri's careful refinement and the sustained literary sensibility of his mitate compositions, in which contemporary Yoshiwara beauties stand in for the anonymous poetic subjects of the classical Tamagawa. Impressions of designs from the series are held by the Art Institute of Chicago.