Eight Bridges (Yatsuhashi)

Eight Bridges (八ツ橋, Yatsuhashi) is a 1945 painting by Kawabata Ryūshi held by the Yamatane Museum of Art in Tokyo, one of the principal nihonga-focused collections in Japan. The subject — irises blooming along zigzag plank bridges at the famous site of Yatsuhashi in Mikawa Province — is one of the great recurring motifs of Japanese painting, drawn from a celebrated passage in the tenth-century Tales of Ise and best known from Ogata Kōrin's pair of folding screens of c. 1709 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (with a related pair at the Nezu Museum). Ryūshi takes the Rinpa-school motif and translates it into his own mid-twentieth-century idiom: the deep blue of the iris blossoms, the leaves rendered as broad green planes, and the bridges shown as long diagonal compositional spines extending across an extreme horizontal format. Painted in the final months of the Pacific War, the picture transposes a canonical decorative subject into the kaijō geijutsu language Ryūshi had been developing since the late 1920s — an extended public statement, on a scale unusual even within the Rinpa tradition, that places his Seiryūsha exhibition practice in deliberate dialogue with the great decorative paintings of the Edo period.