4 Keisai Eisen 1790 – 1848 Nanga-style Landscape with Pine Tree

first half of the 19th century (Edo period)

This highly specific and unusually collectible sheet is the work of Keisai Eisen. Although this Edo-period master is primarily renowned for his decadent portraits of beauties, here he presents himself in a completely different genre. It is a landscape created in the nanga style (literati painting), which uses a technologically demanding woodblock process to emulate the loose brushstrokes and texture of classical Chinese ink painting. In the foreground, we see detailed pine trees on a riverbank, while bluish silhouettes of mountains loom in the distance. The print originally comes from a harimaze format—a combined sheet containing multiple different motifs, from which this specific scene was carefully cut out by a collector in the past to be pasted into an album. The sheet bears the signature Keisai alongside two red artist's seals (Ei, Sen).