A Collection of Flower and Bird Paintings (Keinen kachō gafu), vol.3 (Autumn) (景年花鳥畫譜秋之部) by Imao Keinen — Japanese Woodblock Print

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A Collection of Flower and Bird Paintings (Keinen kachō gafu), vol. 3 (Autumn) 景年花鳥畫譜秋之部, dated 1892 and held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, is the autumn volume of Imao Keinen's signature four-volume seasonal album, the publishing project that consolidated his reputation as one of the two leading Kyoto kachō-ga designers of late Meiji nihonga alongside Kōno Bairei. The autumn volume gathers the canonical bird-and-flower pairings of the Japanese painting calendar from the end of summer through the early frosts: quail among ripening rice and bush clover (hagi), small finches with susuki (pampas grass) under the harvest moon, geese descending to autumn fields, sparrows and buntings among the chrysanthemum (kiku), pheasants beside the late maples, and the canonical pairing of mandarin duck and reed at the river edge. As a leading pupil of Kōno Bairei and an heir to the Maruyama-Shijō observational discipline transmitted from Maruyama Ōkyo and Matsumura Goshun, Keinen rendered each pairing with the brushed ink line, soft graded color, and sparse compositional economy that defined Kyoto nihonga in the late nineteenth century, the woodblock medium translating brush-on-silk effects into mass-reproducible print form through delicate gradation and restrained registration. The autumn volume gave Keinen particular scope for the elegiac late-season palette of russet, ochre, and faded purple that the Kyoto Shijō school had inherited from its Chinese painting sources, with the chrysanthemum and bush-clover passages displaying his command of the spiky-petal massing and pendulous foliage that mark his mature floral manner. The set was cut by leading Kyoto block-cutters and printed on absorbent [washi](/glossary/washi) in the traditional fukurotoji binding, each opening reading as a paired composition rather than a stand-alone sheet. The Victoria and Albert Museum catalogues the volume (https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O489992) within its substantial Meiji nihonga book holdings, where Keinen kachō gafu functions as a benchmark example of the second-generation Kyoto kachō-ga program. For Imao Keinen specifically, the autumn volume documents his command of the most literarily charged season of the Japanese painting calendar.