Sweet peas

A design depicting sweet pea blossoms, an introduced Western flower that became a fashionable subject in Taishō-era Japanese decorative art. The print likely arranges several stems in a diagonal or asymmetric composition, with the distinctive ruffled standards and wing petals reduced to clean curving silhouettes — a treatment that recalls the floral panels of Mucha and the Glasgow School while remaining grounded in the Japanese decorative tradition of rinpa and yamato-e. Color is applied in flat passages keyed to the natural pinks, lavenders, and pale greens of the species, with the woodblock outline doing most of the descriptive work. Sweet peas (suītopī) entered Japanese gardens in the late nineteenth century and quickly became associated with the modern, Western-leaning culture of the early twentieth century, making them a fitting subject for Sugiura, whose career was built on translating European graphic vocabularies into a distinctly Japanese visual language. The design fits within his ongoing project of producing modern zuan that could circulate in print, on packaging, and across the new commercial surfaces of urban Tokyo.