Parasol and Irises

Parasol and Irises is a color woodblock print by Kawabata Gyokushō, dated about 1880-1890, held by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (accession RP-P-1961-142) as part of the thirty-nine-print octagonal album donated to the museum in 1961. The print measures 22.3 by 28.7 cm and pairs the standard summer motif of irises in a marsh or pond with a Japanese parasol (kasa or higasa), one of the small everyday objects that recur throughout Edo and Meiji decorative arts as symbols of seasonal life and domestic ritual. The iris (kakitsubata or shōbu) is one of the most heavily freighted plants in Japanese poetic tradition, descending from the great Tales of Ise episode at the Eight Bridges (Yatsuhashi) of Mikawa and figuring centrally in the Rinpa decorative tradition (Ogata Kōrin's Iris screens) that any nineteenth-century Japanese painter would have known. Gyokushō's treatment puts his Maruyama-school close observation of the iris leaves and blossoms at the service of an explicitly decorative composition. The octagonal format of the album frames the scene as an object for connoisseur viewing — small, intimate, technically refined, and culturally allusive — and exemplifies the kind of Meiji-period print production in which senior nihonga painters could profitably participate.