A Collection of Flower and Bird Paintings (Keinen kachō gafu), vol.2 (Summer)

The Summer volume of the Keinen kachō gafu, published in Kyoto in 1891, opens the warm-season half of Imao Keinen's four-volume survey of Japanese birds and flowers. Its plates concentrate on the imagery of midsummer: irises and water plants along streams and ponds, peonies in full bloom, summer grasses, fireflies, kingfishers, herons, ducks, swallows over rice paddies, and the small birds that animate the rainy and humid weeks of June and July. Keinen's command of the Shijō painting tradition — observation drawn from direct study of living birds and plants, organized in long diagonals and asymmetric compositions against generous negative space — gives each plate a quality of immediate, located observation rather than generic decoration. The print run was produced under publisher Nishimura Sōzaemon with the carver Tanaka Jirokichi and the printers Miki Jinzaburō and Tanaka Harubei; together they pushed Meiji Kyoto color printing to a technical level competitive with the finest Tokyo nishiki-e and with the best ehon (illustrated books) of the late Edo period. The V&A copy (E.2493-1925) entered the museum in 1925 and is one of several institutional sets that helped establish the international reputation of the album.