Courtiers' Carriages, from the series Worlds of Things (Momoyogusa)

Courtiers' Carriages (Gosho-guruma) is a colour woodblock print from Momoyogusa (Flowers of a Hundred Worlds), the three-volume orihon design album published in Kyoto in 1909-10 by Yamada Unsōdō and designed by Kamisaka Sekka (1866-1942). The Art Institute of Chicago's impression (127732) belongs to the museum's Momoyogusa group. The plate restages the Heian-period imperial ox carriage (gosho-guruma) — a recurring motif in yamato-e and Rimpa decorative painting from the medieval narrative scrolls onward, and a familiar shorthand for classical court culture — in Sekka's neo-Rimpa graphic idiom. The carriages are reduced to flat decorative silhouettes, their woven blinds, gold trim, and ox tethers organized as a pattern across the picture surface rather than rendered in volumetric perspective. The plate exemplifies the late-Meiji Kyoto programme of repackaging Heian court iconography as a working pattern source for the kimono, lacquer, and metalwork trades, and it sits in direct lineage with the eighteenth-century Rimpa screens of Ogata Kōrin that had used the same gosho-guruma motif as a free-floating ornamental element.