Flowers of a Hundred Worlds (Momoyogusa), vols. 1-3

Momoyogusa (百々世草, Flowers of a Hundred Worlds) is a three-volume woodblock-printed orihon (accordion-bound) album issued in Kyoto in 1909-10 by the publisher Yamada Unsōdō, designed by Kamisaka Sekka (1866-1942). The Cleveland Museum of Art's master set (1988.23) preserves the complete three volumes together and is one of the principal Western institutional copies of the work. The album comprises sixty colour-printed plates that redeploy the visual vocabulary of the Edo-period Rimpa tradition — scattered Rimpa fans, irises and plum branches, waves and plovers, autumn grasses, Heian court figures and ox carts, the Six Immortal Poets — across flat decorative compositions printed with ink, colour, and the full late-Meiji Kyoto repertoire of metallic and mineral pigments: silver, gold, copper, powdered shell white, embossed (karazuri) grounds, and tarashikomi pooled-pigment effects rendered into print. Conceived simultaneously as a pattern library for Kyoto's kimono and lacquer trades and as a free-standing decorative-art object collected internationally, Momoyogusa is the defining publication of Sekka's career and one of the foundational documents of modern Japanese graphic design — the single most explicit articulation of his programme to carry the Rimpa idiom of Sōtatsu and Kōrin out of the Edo period and into twentieth-century design.