Surimono catalogue FINAL WEB.pdf - Sanders of Oxford

Keisai Eisen (1790-1848)
Keisai Eisen was the son of the colligrapher Ikeda Shigeharu. He was born in Edo and studied
with a Kano painter, Hakkeisai, and then with Kikugawa Eizan. He specialised in pictures of
women, book illustrations and erotica. He designed a number of surimono in the late 1810s
andlate 1820s.
Hosoda Eishi (1756-1829)
Hosoda Eishi was a samurai who studied with Kano Eisen in Sukenobu and became an official
painter at the court of the shogun in Edo. He was given the name Eishi, it the alleged, by the
Tokugawa shogun Ieharu. In the mid 1780s he was supposed to have studied with an otherwise
unknown ukiyo-e printmaker named Torii Bunryusai. Eishi designed his first woodblock prints
around 1786. During the next decade he was very active as print designer, specializing in pictures
of beautiful women. Around 1797 he retired from print design and devoted the rest of his life to
painting.
Kikukawa Eishin (fl. c. 1810s - 1820s)
Kikukawa Eishin was a pupil of Kikukawa Eizan. He designed a few commerical and surimono
prints.
Kikugawa Eizan (1787-1868)
Eizan was the most prolific, longest-lived and ultimately the best of the late followers of Utamaro,
who attempted to carry on the master’s bijin style after his death in 1806. Along with Kikumaro,
Tsukimaro and Utamaro II, Eizan has generally been dismissed by connoisseurs as a plagiarist
of Utamaro’s late style, but his work developed, like that of most ukiyo-e artists, from a close
identification with a leading master to a studied independence.Unlike the artists with whom he
is often associated, Eizan was not an actual pupil of Kitagawa Utamaro, but studied originally
with his father, Kikugawa Eiji, a Kano style painter and fan maker, and later with the Shijo artist
Suzuki Nanrei and the Hokusai pupil Hokkei. He produced some remarkable triptychs and vertical
diptychs, as well as a few surimono. He seems to have retired from printmaking in the late 1820s,
though he did contribute illustrations for books even quite late in his life.
Yashima Gakutei (c. 1786 - 1868)
Schooled in Kokusai’s workshop under the tutelage of Hokkei, Gakutei, while principally involved
in creating surimono, was a well known writer and kyôka poet. He was the illegitimate son of
an Edo samurai by the name of Hirata, who was in the service of the Bakufu. His mother’s
subsequent marriage into the Yashima clan, however, gave him the art-name by which he is
chiefly known. Although prolific, it was the delicate beauty and precise technical quality of his
surimono, which distinguished him from other artists.
Harukawa Goshichi (1776-1831)