Moon over Musashino, from the series Worlds of Things (Momoyogusa)
百々世草 武蔵野の月
- Date:
- 1909-10
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print
- Source:
- Art Institute of Chicago
百々世草 武蔵野の月
Moon over Musashino (Musashino no tsuki) is a colour woodblock print from Momoyogusa (Flowers of a Hundred Worlds), the three-volume orihon design album issued in Kyoto in 1909-10 by Yamada Unsōdō and designed by Kamisaka Sekka (1866-1942). The Art Institute of Chicago's impression (127736) was acquired through the Mr. and Mrs. Hubert Fischer Fund. The plate is one of the most reproduced images in Sekka's oeuvre: a single full white moon rising over the silvery autumn grasses (susuki) of the Musashino plain, the entire composition reduced to a few flat planes of silver, white, and pale ink against a quiet ground. The reference to Musashino — the great grass plain extending east of Edo, a classical site in Heian poetry routinely paired with the autumn moon — situates the image in the deepest waka tradition while restating the motif in the spare graphic language of Sekka's neo-Rimpa modernism. The plate exemplifies the printing technology of late-Meiji Kyoto: silver pigment laid over many-block colour impressions, the grasses defined as much by the embossed ([karazuri](/glossary/karazuri)) ground as by their printed line. Together with Plovers Flying Across a River, Silvered Waves Against a Beach, and Hydrangeas, it is among the Momoyogusa plates most often cited in any survey of modern Japanese design.
百々世草下絵 雷神
1909
Drawing on tracing paper; ink and color
百々世草 牡丹
1909-10
Color woodblock print
百々世草 御所車
1909-10
Color woodblock print
百々世草
1909-10
Color woodblock print
![Mount Fuji on a Moonlit Night, Kawai Bridge (Tsukiyo no Fuji [Kawaibashi]), from the series "Selection of Views of the Tokaido (Tokaido fukei senshu)" by Kawase Hasui](https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/d0960668-1e73-339a-b182-fb995a54bff0/full/843,/0/default.jpg)
1947
Color woodblock print; oban
March 1933
Color woodblock print; oban
1919
Color woodblock print
January 1938
Woodblock print, ink and color on paper
Moon over Musashino, from the series Worlds of Things (Momoyogusa) (百々世草 武蔵野の月) was created by Kamisaka Sekka (神坂雪佳) in 1909-10.
Moon over Musashino, from the series Worlds of Things (Momoyogusa) depicts moonlight.