Eishosai Choki

Eishosai Choki, also romanized Eishōsai Chōki and also known by the name Momokawa Choki, was a Japanese designer of ukiyo-e woodblock prints active from roughly the 1780s to about 1810, in the late Edo period. He is consistently described in museum and scholarly sources as a pupil, and possibly an adopted son, of the painter Toriyama Sekien, studying in Sekien's studio in Edo alongside Kitagawa Utamaro. No school, degree, or precise years of study are documented, only this atelier-based apprenticeship.

Choki signed his prints under more than one art name over his career. Sources describe him using the name Shiko earlier in his career and again later, with Choki used through the middle of it, including a documented switch back to Shiko around 1795 to 1796 and a return to Choki by around 1801. He is best known for half-length bijin-ga portraits of courtesans and geisha, often set against mica-dusted backgrounds, published chiefly by the print house of Tsutaya Juzaburo. His illustrations for the book Nakoso Gate (Nakoso no seki) are cited as his last documented work, dated to 1809.

No birth or death date is confirmed in major museum or scholarly references; institutions including the Metropolitan Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and Scholten Japanese Art describe him only by his years of activity. A birth year of 1725 and death year of 1795 appear in some tertiary sources such as Wikidata, but these are not corroborated by primary art-historical scholarship and should be treated as unverified. What is certain is that Choki was a historical Edo-period figure and is long deceased.

Museum literature places Choki as a follower of Utamaro who nonetheless developed his own variation on bijin-ga; the Portland Art Museum notes a distinctive freshness and delicacy in his figures, while the Honolulu Museum of Art situates his style, per critic Charles Mitchell, within a Mannerist framework marked by elongated, emotionally charged poses. Japan's National Museum of Japanese History similarly credits him with establishing his own manner of depicting women, gentle and beautiful, within the broader Kansei-era ukiyo-e tradition. No award or formal honor is documented for Choki in any of these sources, consistent with his status as an artist recognized through museum scholarship rather than institutional prizes.

Choki's market is thin and poorly documented compared with major ukiyo-e names such as Utamaro or Hokusai. The highest publicly documented auction result identified is EUR 130, for Portrait of the Courtesan Tsukasa-dayu, sold at Galerie Zacke in Vienna; the exact sale date is not documented in available sources. Given the limited digitization of older ukiyo-e sales records and the generally modest values typical of his prints, this figure should be read as the best-documented result available rather than a confirmed all-time high. His work also circulates through specialist dealers, including Scholten Japanese Art in New York and JapanesePrints-London, both of which have offered individual Choki prints in recent years; neither functions as a formal gallery representative or estate in the modern sense, since no such structure exists for an artist of this period.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Choki, and attribution depends on museum provenance and connoisseurship rather than a certificate program, a task made harder by his own alternating use of the names Choki and Shiko during his career. Auction data is extremely sparse, with only a handful of documented sales and no clear price benchmark, so any single result should be treated cautiously rather than as a market indicator. Collectors interested in his prints are dealing with a niche, low-liquidity category where museum-grade impressions in institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and Japan's National Museum of Japanese History offer the clearest points of reference for quality and authenticity.