Blue flower

Blue flower is a kacho-e composition, the bird-and-flower genre that shin-hanga publishers issued alongside their figure and landscape subjects. The print's title points to a single flower — possibly an iris, a hydrangea, a morning glory, or a gentian, all flowers regularly rendered in blue within the Japanese kacho-e canon — treated as the principal subject either alone or with a small bird or insect. Kacho-e prints of this period rely heavily on bokashi gradation to model petals and leaves, with the carver assigned the fine veining that distinguishes individual specimens. The blue itself, traditionally derived from indigo or from the imported Prussian blue (bero-ai) that entered Japanese printmaking in the nineteenth century, was a pigment shin-hanga printers handled with the layered washes the movement's washi printing supported. Within Kato Shinmei's output, which is dominated by figures and landscapes, this kacho-e subject extends the range typical of a shin-hanga designer working under a publisher's commissioned program.