Camellia Petals Scattering

Camellia Petals Scattering (名樹散椿, Meiju sanchin), painted by Hayami Gyoshū in 1929, is one of the defining masterpieces of early Shōwa nihonga and an officially designated Important Cultural Property of Japan. The work takes the form of a pair of two-panel folding screens, each pair approximately 167.9 by 169.6 cm, executed in mineral pigments on a paper ground covered with gold leaf and gold-leaf squares (kirikane). The subject is the celebrated 'scattering camellia' (chiritsubaki) at Jizō-in, a Kyoto Kitayama temple popularly known as the Camellia Temple: a five-colored, double-blossom tree unusual in that its petals fall one by one rather than as whole flowers. Gyoshū organizes the composition around the gnarled, twisting trunk of the tree, with branches reaching across both halves of the screen and individual blossoms and isolated petals scattered against the gold ground with a near-botanical precision. The result reads simultaneously as a virtuoso decorative composition in the Rinpa tradition descended from Sōtatsu and Kōrin and as a quiet meditation on impermanence, with each falling petal made the equal of the tree itself. The Yamatane Museum of Art in Tokyo, which holds the screens as part of its concentrated Gyoshū collection assembled from the Ataka holdings in 1976, places this work at the center of its presentation of early Shōwa nihonga; for students of modern Japanese painting, Camellia Petals Scattering is the single best demonstration of how Gyoshū fused Edo-derived decorative gold-ground tradition with the rigorously observed naturalism of twentieth-century nihonga reform.