Sixteen Illustrations of Ancient Ceremonial Displays

Sixteen Illustrations of Ancient Ceremonial Displays (Kodai chinretsu jūroku zu) is an orihon-format (accordion-bound) woodblock-printed album of 1903 by the Kyoto designer Furuya Kōrin (1875-1910), now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 2016.751.4, gift of Anita V. Beenk, 2016). The volume gathers sixteen colour-printed plates illustrating ceremonial displays and ornamental arrangements drawn from the Rinpa and yamato-e revival vocabulary that Furuya and his Kyoto contemporaries were assembling at the turn of the twentieth century. Each plate is a self-contained design, alternately presenting interiors, screens, altar tables, and ritual objects in the highly stylized manner of late-Meiji decorative reform — references to the antiquarian taste of the Heian and early Edo courts repackaged as model patterns for the Kyoto crafts trades. The album was produced under the Kyoto publisher Yamada Unsōdō, the same press that issued Furuya's pattern books and the design journal Shin-Bijutsukai that he edited, and the printing displays the technical refinements of late-Meiji Kyoto colour printing: many-colour impressions, careful registration, and embossing in the page surface. The work belongs to a distinct sub-genre of Furuya's published oeuvre — iconographic and ceremonial rather than purely ornamental — and complements the more purely decorative pattern albums (Kōrin moyō, Shasei sōka moyō, Kodai moyō chōchō) with which he is most closely associated.