Hydrangeas, from the series Worlds of Things (Momoyogusa)

Hydrangeas (Ajisai) 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 (127737, 29.8 × 44.8 cm) was acquired through the Mr. and Mrs. Hubert Fischer Fund. The plate distils the hydrangea — a quintessentially early-summer Japanese flowering shrub — into a flat decorative composition in Sekka's neo-Rimpa idiom: rounded flower clusters in graded blue and lavender, the foliage reduced to overlapping leaf silhouettes, and the field organized by the tarashikomi (pooled-pigment) effects that Edo-period Rimpa painters had developed in ink and that the late-Meiji Kyoto colour woodblock had learned to translate into print. The Hydrangeas plate is one of the most explicitly Rimpa-coded compositions in Momoyogusa: it places Sekka's modern design vocabulary in direct conversation with Sōtatsu and Kōrin while functioning as a pattern source for the kimono, lacquer, and ceramic trades clustered around Kyoto's craft districts.