The Six Immortal Poets, from the series Worlds of Things (Momoyogusa)

The Six Immortal Poets (Rokkasen) 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 (127741) belongs to the museum's Momoyogusa group. The plate restages the Rokkasen — the six canonical waka poets of the early Heian period codified in the preface to the Kokin Wakashū (905) and a defining iconographic group for Edo-period painting and print — in Sekka's neo-Rimpa decorative idiom: the poets reduced to flat overlapping silhouettes in characteristic court costume, arranged across the picture field as a single ornamental group rather than the discrete portraits the convention had historically called for. The composition foregrounds Sekka's interest in the yamato-e and Rimpa antiquarian tradition — the same vein his collaborator Furuya Kōrin pursued in the orihon Sixteen Illustrations of Ancient Ceremonial Displays — and exemplifies the late-Meiji Kyoto programme of repackaging Heian court culture as a modern design vocabulary suitable for the kimono and lacquer trades.