Keisai Eisen

Eisen lived in Edo (now Tokyo) when the city pulsed with theaters, teahouses, and woodblock prints. He started as a samurai’s son, then switched to art, signing work with both “Eisen” and “Ikeda Eisen.” He wrote popular fiction under the pen name Ippitsuan, so he was as much storyteller as painter.

His habit of painting women with pale necks so long they looked like swans got so famous that rival artists copied the look. One print series, The Six Women of the Green Houses, shows the same face tilted left, right, up, down, like a face turned on a potter’s wheel.

Look for those high-shouldered kimonos in deep indigo and crimson, the skin left ghost-white, and the tiny, precise wrinkles around the eyes. The background is usually a single flat color, so the women float like cut-outs. That’s his trick: make a face so sharp it stays with you even when the rest of the picture is just a wash of color.