Hatsuume (First Plum Blossom of the Year)

Hatsuume (初梅, the First Plum Blossom of the Year) is a hanging-scroll painting by Araki Jippō rendered in ink on paper, dating from the painter's late career and belonging to the monochrome kachō-e idiom that critics regarded as one of his most refreshing late contributions to the Tokyo bird-and-flower tradition. The plum blossom (ume) is among the most heavily encoded subjects in the East Asian painting tradition: as the first flowering tree of the year, breaking into bloom while snow still lies on the ground, it carries strong associations of resilience, scholarly virtue, and the New Year, and it is one of the 'three friends of winter' (shōchikubai — pine, bamboo, plum) that have been a touchstone of Chinese and Japanese painting since the Song dynasty. Jippō's hatsuume — literally 'first plum' — turns to the moment when only one or two blossoms have opened on the otherwise bare branches, the most demanding compositional choice in plum painting because it requires the painter to carry the entire image on a few brush strokes of ink. The work belongs to the late phase of Jippō's career in which he set aside the color pigments and gold ground of his more elaborate Taishō compositions in favor of an ink-only idiom that returned to the disciplined brush practice of the Edo Nanga and Maruyama-Shijō traditions in which his adoptive father Araki Kanpō had been originally trained. The painting survives in private collections and is representative of Jippō's late ink kachō-e, the body of work that brought his career to its quiet close in the closing years of the Shōwa period before the Pacific War.