Flowers In The Evening - 花の夕べ

Flowers In The Evening (花の夕べ, Hana no yūbe) is a Kasamatsu Mihoko woodblock print indexed by ukiyo-e.org through the catalogue of the Ohmi Gallery, a long-running Japanese print dealer that has been a primary source of postwar mokuhanga on the secondary market. The title combines two recurring motifs in her work: flowers, which appear in many of her still-life compositions, and evening light, the same yūbe / yūshō tradition that organizes Evening Glow.

Where conventional shin-hanga flower prints often presented the subject under clear daylight or the controlled light of an interior scene, the choice of evening here pushes the composition into the more atmospheric register that postwar sōsaku-hanga artists favored. Evening light flattens local color, deepens the shadows in petals and leaves, and unifies the still life into a single tonal field. The result is a print that reads less as a botanical study and more as a meditation on the quality of light at a particular hour — a sensibility that connects Mihoko's work to the broader twentieth-century interest, both in Japan and in Western modernism, in the temporal specificity of perception.

Ohmi Gallery's high-resolution image (the file is delivered at 2000 pixels on the long edge) suggests this print received the same level of care in documentation as the gallery's better-known artists. For collectors, Flowers In The Evening represents one of the more accessible Mihoko prints in circulation: clearly signed, well-photographed in the dealer record, and rooted in a subject — domestic floral arrangement under low light — that has remained popular with collectors of postwar Japanese woodblock from the 1970s onward.