Eizan, Kikukawa (1787-1867) - Kiyomizu komachi 1804-1818

This image by Kikukawa Eizan features a Japanese geisha.

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Kikukawa Eizan (1787-1867) was a designer of ukiyo-e style Japanese woodblock prints. He first studied with his father, Eiji, a minor painter of the Kanō school, and subsequently with Suzuki Nanrei (1775-1844), of the Shijō school. He is believed to have also studied with ukiyo-e artist Totoya Hokkei (1790–1850). He produced numerous woodblock prints of beautiful women (bijin-ga) in the 1830s, but then abandoned printmaking in favour of painting.

Eizan was the most prolific, longest-lived and ultimately the best of those late followers of Utamaro who attempted to carry on the master's bijin style after his death in 1806. Along with Tsukimaro and Utamaro II, Eizan has generally been dismissed by connoisseurs as a plagiarist of Utamaro's late style, but his work in fact develops, like that of most ukiyo-e artists, from a close identification with a leading master to a studied independence, and contains pieces of remarkable beauty and interest.

As Eizan reached artistic maturity, he began to develop his own figural style, still focused for the most part on prints of beautiful women (bijin-ga). Eizan's work retains the sensitivities and lyricism that marks the Utamaro style, as opposed to the earthier realism and more overt sensuality of Kunisada and Keisai Eisen.

Eizan, like Toyokuni I in actor prints, is the last manifestation of the classical ukiyo-e style in bijin work, with harmonious colours and graceful lines and subjects. After him, one senses the introduction of a different aesthetic, with harsher colours, angular lines and less ethereal material, more of an emphasis, in sum, on the material weight of earthly life, rather than its transformation into something of elegance.

He was also left-handed, which was strange at such a time in Japan.