Temple with Plums; Distant Sailboats

Temple with Plums; Distant Sailboats is a small color woodblock print by Kawabata Gyokushō, dated about 1880-1890 and held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of the Julian C. Wright Bequest (accession number M.79.152.305). The print measures 19.6 by 18.6 cm (7 11/16 by 7 5/16 in.) — close to a square format unusual in Japanese print history but characteristic of the surimono and album-leaf traditions from which late-nineteenth-century Meiji color printing drew. Its composition pairs the standard Japanese painting subject of an early-spring plum tree in blossom in front of a temple gate with a long-range view of sailboats on a distant body of water, layering a foreground floral motif over a deep-perspective landscape in a way that reflects Gyokushō's interest in selectively integrating Western perspective into the inherited Japanese nihonga vocabulary. As one of the few color woodblock prints by a major Meiji nihonga painter from the 1880s in a Western museum collection, the LACMA print is useful evidence both for Gyokushō's involvement with the high-end Meiji print trade and for the porosity, in that decade, of the boundary between formal nihonga painting and the smaller-scale graphic genres.