Poppy ("Devil")

A botanical design featuring a stylized poppy bloom, likely rendered in the flat decorative idiom that Sugiura developed across his zuan (design) publications. The parenthetical "Devil" probably refers to a particular cultivar or color variant within a series of flower studies. Compositionally, prints of this kind typically isolate the flower against a plain or minimally patterned ground, reducing petal, stamen, and leaf to crisp shapes bounded by clean contour lines — an approach that draws directly on the European Art Nouveau and Vienna Secession poster aesthetics Sugiura encountered during his 1922 study trip to Europe and absorbed back into Japanese graphic practice. The mokuhanga technique allows for the broad, even color fields these designs require, with carefully registered key blocks defining outline. Within Sugiura's wider body of work, floral plates of this type sit between his commercial posters for Mitsukoshi and his pedagogical zuan-shū (design collections), which he produced to establish a vocabulary of modern Japanese pattern-making for the next generation of graphic designers working in the Taishō and early Shōwa eras.