Keisai Eisen (1791–1848) is an Ukiyo-e artist who lived during the late Edo period and is famous for his paintings and prints of beautiful women. However, Eisen also designed landscape prints, of which some include alphabetic picture frames. During my study of these prints, I discovered that Prussian blue was used to print these works and learned that Eisen was imitating prints by the artist Shōtei Hokuju (dates unknown). The Western-style techniques that Eisen adopted in these works can also be seen in his pictures of beautiful women from time to time, but there only some landscape prints where Eisen used them. Instead, he often designed landscape prints in a more traditional style and mainly focused on his images of human figures. In this paper, I argue that Eisen's adoption of Western-style techniques was generally limited to personal experiments and works that were specifically commissioned as Western-style landscapes.

特集 : 林温教授 退職記念号