The Ide Jewel River in Yamashiro Province

The Ide Jewel River in Yamashiro Province, from the Six Jewel Rivers series (Mu Tamagawa), is an aiban (medium vertical format) color woodblock print by Rekisentei Eiri of around 1785. The Tamagawa of Ide, in Yamashiro Province south of the old capital of Kyoto, is associated in classical waka with the kerria roses (yamabuki) that bloomed along its banks in early summer — a motif that Heian and medieval poets returned to repeatedly as an image of fragile seasonal beauty. Eiri pictures a tall, gracefully attenuated bijin near the imagined river, her stance and trailing kimono evoking the courtly atmosphere of the classical poetic site. The figure is rendered in the Chōbunsai school's signature manner — elongated neck, narrow oval face, small hands and feet, the kimono falling in long vertical pleats — and the muted palette of pale plums, silvers, and ivory tones preserves the aristocratic register that distinguishes the school from Utamaro's denser bijin-ga. The Ide Tamagawa is one of the six poetic rivers Eiri designed for the series, completing a set that ranks among the most accomplished extended sequences in his small surviving corpus. Impressions are held by the Art Institute of Chicago.