The Koya Jewel River in Kii Province

The Kōya Jewel River in Kii Province, from Rekisentei Eiri's Six Jewel Rivers series (Mu Tamagawa), is an aiban (medium vertical format) color woodblock print of the mid-to-late 1780s. The series translates the six classical Tamagawa of Japanese waka poetry — the Jewel Rivers of Mount Kōya, Chōfu, Tetsukuri, Plovers, Ide, and Bush Clovers — into bijin-ga set-pieces in which a single elegantly attenuated beauty stands at each poetic site. The Jewel River of Mount Kōya, in Kii Province, is the only one of the six whose poetic association forbids women, the holy mountain having been sacred to Shingon Buddhism and historically closed to female pilgrims; Eiri's choice to depict an elegant beauty near its imagined banks is itself a sophisticated mitate (classical allusion). The figure is rendered in the Chōbunsai school's signature attenuated manner — long neck, narrow oval face, small hands, kimono falling in vertical pleats — and the aiban format produces a tall, narrow composition that emphasizes the figure's verticality. The series belongs to a conscious dialogue with Eiri's teacher Chōbunsai Eishi, who had published his own Mu Tamagawa of about 1787, and the two sets are among the most instructive instances of Chōbunsai school intertextuality. Impressions are held by the Art Institute of Chicago.