Silvered Waves Against a Beach, from the series Worlds of Things (Momoyogusa)

Silvered Waves Against a Beach 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 (127738) belongs to the museum's group of eighteen Momoyogusa plates. The composition organizes the picture surface into two flat horizontal registers — a beach above, a band of stylized waves below — each treated as a pattern of repeating curls and ridges in silver pigment against a dark ground. The plate is one of the clearest statements in Sekka's printed oeuvre of his debt to Ogata Kōrin's Waves at Matsushima screens and to Sōtatsu's screen designs: the wave motif is among the oldest in Rimpa's working vocabulary, and Sekka's plate distils it into a free-standing pattern field that could be transferred directly to kimono textile, lacquer ground, or ceramic decoration. The silver-on-ground colour scheme exploits the metallic-pigment register that late-Meiji Kyoto colour woodblock printing had perfected, and the plate stands alongside Moon over Musashino and Plovers Flying Across a River as one of the most reproduced images of the entire series.