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Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Ancient Art / KEISAI EISEN • KAKEMONO-E · FULL-LENGTH BEAUTY · TENPŌ ERA · c
Artist: Keisai Eisen (渓斎英泉) Title: Beauty with Bat Obi and Duck Kimono Technique: Woodblock print (nishiki-e) Format: Kakemono-e, two seperate ōban sheets (each approx. 24*36cm) forming one vertical design Date: c. 1840 (Tenpō era) Signature: Keisai Eisen ga (渓斎英泉画) Seals: Kiwame (極) censor seal See Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art: https://asia-archive.si.edu/object/FSC-GR-625a-b/ CONDITION Fair color and impression, mild toning and soiling, light repair mark on the margins, two separate sheets. Overall fair condition! Please check the images carefully. About the Print Keisai Eisen was the leading designer of beauty prints (bijinga) in the 1820s and 1830s. He moved away from the tall, idealised women of Utamaro's generation toward a more worldly and sensual type, and his women are often read as the most characteristic faces of late-Edo taste. He knew the pleasure quarters well, having run a brothel in Nezu for a time, and he wrote as well as painted. His output shrank in the 1840s, and he died in 1848. The kakemono-e format was a publisher's answer to a practical demand. Two full-size sheets were printed to join vertically into a single tall image that could be mounted and hung like a scroll painting, giving buyers a full-length figure at a fraction of the cost of a painting. Many were hung, handled and worn out, so complete pairs with both sheets present are the exception rather than the rule. Here the design shows a beauty whose sash carries a bat motif, a traditional emblem of good fortune borrowed from China, where the word for bat sounds like the word for luck, worn over a kimono patterned with ducks. The kiwame seal dates the print to before the Tenpō reforms of 1842, which banned lavish prints of courtesans and geisha and brought this kind of luxurious full-length beauty to a halt.
Estimate:£214.28
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Estimate:
£214.28
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