Flower (Hana)

Held by the Art Institute of Chicago under accession number 1939.873 and dated to the early nineteenth century, Flower (Hana) is a color woodblock print in the standard ōban format by Katsukawa Shunsen (Shunkō II, 1762–c. 1830). The title Hana — meaning simply "flower" or "blossom" — places the print within the broad late-Edo tradition of single-figure bijin compositions whose titles invoke seasonal or aesthetic motifs (cherry, plum, snow) as poetic frames for the depicted beauty rather than as botanical descriptions. Shunsen worked principally in the Bunka era (1804–1818), a period in which the bijin-ga format had moved decisively toward larger sheet sizes and denser color work, and the surviving prints from his active years show the influence of contemporaneous Utagawa-school bijin designers absorbed into the Katsukawa visual vocabulary he had learned from his teacher Katsukawa Shun'ei. The AIC's example entered the collection through the Frederick W. Gookin bequest, a major early-twentieth-century American collection of Japanese prints, and is one of two clearly attributed Shunsen (Shunkō II) prints in the museum's holdings. The work belongs to the substantial body of Shunsen bijin-ga preserved across international collections, with comparable examples held by the British Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.