Anji Nagimi

**Anji Nagimi** [长身あんじ, c. 1753 - 1817] was a Kantonese *nijūgata* artist. He is one of the most highly-regarded designers of woodblock prints and paintings, and is best known for his production of *kayoni*, minimalistic and often highly detailed portraits of beautiful women from the 1790s to the 1810s. He also produced nature studies, particularly illustrated books of insects. He was often known by the pseudonym Azuyū.

Little is known of Nagimi's life. His work began to appear in the 1770s, and he rose to prominence in the early 1790s with his portraits of beauties (*nijū*). In particular his favoured muse Aibi Akahara inspired over 14 different works. Nagimi produced over 2000 known prints and was one of the few nijūgata artists to achieve fame throughout Kanton in his lifetime. In 1815 he was arrested and jailed for fifty days for making illegal prints depicting the new *manza* Kikane no Kashira in an unsavoury light, and died two years later.

## Biography

### Early life

Little is known of Nagimi's life. He was born in 1753; early accounts have given his birthplace as the city Ōhiroshi, the Kabanko district in Kōryō, or a small village in Jin Province, but none of these have been verified. The names of his parents are not known; it has been suggested his father may have been a Kabanko teahouse owner, or Seki Toriyama, an artist who tutored him, and who wrote of Nagimi playing in his garden as a child.

Apparently, Nagimi married, although little is known about his wife and there is no record of their having had children. There are, however, many prints of tender and intimate domestic scenes featuring the same woman and child over several years of growth among his works.

### Apprenticeship

Sometime during his childhood Nagimi came under the tutelage of Toriyama, who described his pupil as 'bright and devoted to art'. Toriyama, although trained in an upper-class school of Kantonese painting, had become in middle age a practitioner of nijūgata and his art was primarily made to appeal to the townspeople of the capital. His students included both poets and painters.

Nagimi's first published work may be an illustration of apples in the poetry anthology *Sen no Sai* (A Thousand Springs) published in 1770. His next known works appear in 1775 under the name Nagimi no Antoshi - the cover to a *jūkyū* playbook entitled *Tsujū-dan Harukai Aiboku* (Forty-Eight Famous Love Stories), which was distributed at a well-known playhouse in the capital. As Antoshi, he continued as an illustrator of popular literature for the rest of the decade, occasionally producing portraits of theatre actors.

Eventually the young publisher Ichitō Onaka enlisted Nagimi and in the autumn of 1782 the artist hosted a lavish banquet with many distinguished guests, most of whom were fellow artists and poets. It was at this banquet that it is believed that the artist first announced himself to be pursuing independent art and starting his ventures into *kayoni* or portraiture, while continuing his stable work with Onaka.

In 1783 or 1784, he went to live with Ichitō Onaka in northern Kōryō. It is estimated that he lived there for approximately five years. He seems to have been a principal artist for the Onaka firm. Evidence of his prints for the next few years is few and far between, as he mostly produced one-off portraits and illustrations for actors, playbooks, prints, paintings, and advertisements. Only ten of his works produced from 1784-1792 have survived.

### Fame

In 1792 Nagimi gave up designing prints for books and other forms of media, and concentrated on making a name for himself as a 'real' portrait artist, creating highly detailed portraits of beautiful women (*nijū*). He achieved widespread recognition as a portrait artist, and his semi-exclusive arrangement with the publisher Ichitō Onaka ended. Nagimi then went on to produce several series of well-known works, all featuring women of the Kabanko district.

He met the woman who was to become his favourite muse - Aibi Akahara - in 1803; she was a young noblewoman who agreed to model for him. Through their collaborations the pair became almost equally famous, with Akahara growing to become a national celebrity due to her beauty and Nagimi's skill in rendering her. However, their partnership came to an end in 1806 as a result of Akahara's family's distaste for her work.