Peonies, from the series Worlds of Things (Momoyogusa)

Peonies (Botan) 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 (117199) belongs to the museum's foundational Momoyogusa holding. The plate takes the peony — the canonical luxury flower of East Asian decorative art, central to Rimpa kachō-ga ('bird-and-flower painting') from the seventeenth century onward — and restates it as a flat decorative pattern in Sekka's modernized neo-Rimpa idiom: large overlapping blossoms in graded mineral pigment, foliage reduced to silhouette, the composition set against an unworked field that frames the motif for transfer to kimono textile, lacquer surface, or ceramic decoration. The plate exemplifies the central design principle of Momoyogusa as a whole — that the Rimpa tradition of Sōtatsu and Kōrin is not a closed historical style but a working pattern vocabulary suitable for direct deployment in the late-Meiji Kyoto craft industries.