Summer Flowers

Summer Flowers is a fan painting by Katsushika Isai in ink and color on silk, remounted as a hanging scroll and now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 2001.561.1). The work belongs to a small group of Isai's paintings that survive in the formal painting formats — fan, scroll, album leaf — alongside the much larger production of woodblock-printed drawing manuals that made his reputation. The fan format itself carried strong seasonal associations in Edo-period Japan: hand-held fans (uchiwa) and folding fans (ōgi) were paired with summer imagery throughout the year as objects of both practical use and decorative refinement, and were a standard format for the small kachō-e (bird-and-flower) compositions in which painters could demonstrate their command of color, brushwork, and seasonal poetics. Isai's composition follows the Hokusai-school habit of placing closely observed plant motifs against generous negative space, with the curved sweep of the fan format giving the design its characteristic compressed energy. The work entered the Metropolitan Museum's collection in 2001 as part of a small group of Isai fans (with 2001.561.2, the Spring Farming Scene) and remains one of the few of his paintings in a major American institutional collection.