Kiyomori's Daughter Painting a Self-Portrait to Send to Her Mother

Catalog note / 解説

This is a nishiki-e (brocade print), so called because its rich palette of colours is likened to nishiki or silk brocades. Eishi (about 1756-1829) was a follower of Kitagawa Utamaro (1754-1806). He was an artist of elevated samurai rank who abandoned his career as an official painter to become an artist of ukiyo-e (pictures of the Floating World). In this print, the daughter of twelfth-century statesman Taira no Kiyomori writes a letter to her mother. Rather than wearing twelfth-century dress, however, she appears as a fashionable beauty of the late 1700s. Materials: Colour print from woodblocks