Hisui zuan-shû. a collection of 50 designs

A plate from, or the title leaf of, Hisui Zuan-shū, Sugiura's published collection of fifty designs intended as a working reference for craftsmen, illustrators, and commercial artists. Zuan-shū (design albums) were a standard genre in late Meiji and Taishō publishing, descended from earlier ehon and pattern books such as those of Kamisaka Sekka, and they served as the primary mechanism by which a senior designer disseminated a personal vocabulary to the wider trade. Sugiura's volume gathers floral, botanical, and abstract motifs treated in the flat, outlined, posterized manner he had refined through his Mitsukoshi advertising work and his contact with European Art Nouveau. The mokuhanga production preserves the saturated, evenly inked color planes that define the printed designs, with sharp registration carrying the contour blocks. The collection occupies a central place in Sugiura's legacy: alongside his teaching at the Imperial Art School and his founding role in Japanese graphic-design pedagogy, the zuan-shū made his approach reproducible and helped establish design (zuan, later dezain) as a distinct professional discipline in twentieth-century Japan.