Print

Print, dated 1906 and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/55180), is a late-Meiji single-sheet woodblock by Tomioka Eisen, produced in the final year of the artist's short career. By 1906 Eisen had emerged as one of the foremost ukiyo-e and book illustrators of the late Meiji period, a specialist in bijin-ga and the new format of kuchi-e literary frontispieces that publishers were attaching to popular novels and to the prestige literary magazine Bungei Kurabu. The print belongs to that late-Meiji moment when the traditional ukiyo-e single-sheet had been largely displaced by photolithography and by the new mass-market periodical, and surviving artists such as Eisen, Tsukioka Kogyo, and Mizuno Toshikata were carrying the woodblock tradition forward through smaller editions aimed at a connoisseur market. Eisen had trained under the Kano-school painter Sano Toshiaki before turning to ukiyo-e, and his bijin-ga reflect that hybrid background, combining the disciplined figure drawing of his Kano apprenticeship with the colorist sensibility of the late ukiyo-e tradition that he had absorbed from his work for the Edo and Tokyo publishers. The Meiji-era bijin he developed inhabits a recognizably modern social world, the kimono and hairstyles registering the contemporary moment rather than the Edo-period nostalgia that had carried earlier Meiji bijin-ga, and the prints accordingly read as documents of late-Meiji urban femininity rather than as exercises in historical pastiche. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves the work as a representative example of Eisen's late single-sheet production in the year of his death, a document of the final flowering of the ukiyo-e single-sheet tradition before its complete absorption into the new printmaking movements of the early twentieth century.