Kōrin moyō (Designs in the Style of Kōrin)

Kōrin moyō (光琳模様, Designs in the Style of Kōrin) is a two-volume orihon (concertina-binding) woodblock-printed design album published in Kyoto in 1907 by Yamada Unsōdō, designed by Furuya Kōrin (1875-1910). The Rijksmuseum's copy (RP-P-2014-18-19) preserves the original blue paper covers with light-green title cartouches, and the museum's description identifies the contents as 'designs in the neo-Rinpa style of Ogata Kōrin'. The album is the most explicit homage in Furuya's published oeuvre to his eighteenth-century namesake Ogata Kōrin (1658-1716), the great Edo-period Rinpa master also active in Kyoto, whose work Furuya, his teacher Kamisaka Sekka, and the wider Unsōdō circle had been deliberately reviving and modernizing as a basis for late-Meiji decorative reform. The plates rework characteristic Rinpa motifs — irises, waves and plovers, scattered fans, autumn grasses, abstract gold and silver clouds — into compositional templates suitable for transfer to kimono textiles, lacquer surfaces, ceramic decoration, and other crafts. The album was originally conceived as a sample book for the Kyoto kimono trade but, like other Furuya/Unsōdō publications, quickly became popular with general design enthusiasts and entered international museum collections as a free-standing decorative-art object.