Hydrangea

Hydrangea takes up the ajisai, a flower closely associated with the rainy season and a recurring subject in Japanese painting and woodblock printmaking. Saito Kaoru's treatment in mezzotint produces a markedly different effect from a nishiki-e rendering of the same flower: rather than discrete color blocks bounded by keyblock line, the hydrangea's compound head of small four-petaled florets is built up from carefully burnished tonal passages set against the deep ground of a rocked copper plate. The technique allows the viewer to read each floret as a separate volume while preserving the cluster as a single mass, a balance well suited to the hydrangea's actual form. Read alongside Saito's Azalea, this print belongs to a sequence of seasonal flower subjects that runs parallel to his more prominent figural and Genji-themed work. It demonstrates the breadth of his mezzotint practice, in which the same patient process of rocking, scraping, and burnishing serves equally for the modeling of a face, a garment, or a blossom.