print;
surimono
- Museum number
- 2014,3054.1
- Description
-
Woodblock print, surimono. Equipment for a scholar's desk, including paper, seal, seal-ink and peacock feathers.
- Production date
-
1817 (?)
-
1820 (?)
- Dimensions
-
Height: 19.70 centimetres
-
Width: 13.60 centimetres
- $Inscriptions
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-
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- Curator's comments
- This specially commissioned and exquisitely crafted surimono print celebrates the taking of the poetry name Yaenari by a personage who previously used the pseudonym ‘Bakufu-ka Senshaku’. His identity is so far unknown, but he appears to have been someone of means, such as a high-ranking samurai or wealthy merchant.
The still-life subjects show the kind of sophisticated paraphernalia typically found on the desk of a scholarly poet or artist with a taste for Chinese literati culture: a carved lacquer seal-ink case containing red seal ink; a pair of carved stone seals, one topped with a cat; a roll of paper; two peacock feathers such as were typically placed in a vase for decoration.
Hokkei was a leading pupil of Hokusai, an accomplished painter, book illustrator and designer of specially-commissioned surimono prints
The print is apparently rare, the only other recorded impression being no. 1945 in the set of three so-called ‘Hayashi albums’ of surimono in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, formerly owned by the dealer and connoisseur Hayashi Tadamasa and bequeather by Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer in 1929:
http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/54513
(T. Clark 12/2014)
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 2014
- Department
- Asia
- Registration number
- 2014,3054.1
