Flowers

Flowers (Kaki-zu) is one of the larger surviving watercolour studies from Kawakami Tōgai's last years, executed on paper at a size now known only from the high-resolution photographic record (1,345 by 1,665 pixels in the surviving digital reproduction, suggesting a sheet of roughly thirty by forty centimetres). The painting belongs to the genre of Western-style botanical studies that Tōgai's pupils at the Chōkō-dō were required to undertake as exercises in the academic vocabulary of light, modelling and pictorial space, and that Tōgai himself executed in considerable numbers throughout the 1870s.

The composition shows a loose bouquet of mixed garden flowers — peonies, lilies and the kind of cultivated cottage-garden subjects that became fashionable in Meiji-era still life under the indirect influence of Dutch and English watercolour models. The brush is loaded in the European manner with stronger contrasts of colour saturation and with cast shadow on the lower foliage, but the placement of the bouquet on an empty ground and the absence of any depicted vessel preserves the Shijō convention of the floating, ungrounded plant study (kaki-zu) that Tōgai's teacher Ōnishi Chinnen had practised at the beginning of the century. The painting is among the clearest demonstrations in Tōgai's work of his synthesising method: the Bunjin habit of empty-ground composition is preserved, while the colouristic substance is drawn from European watercolour practice.

The work survives in a Shinano regional collection and is reproduced via Wikimedia Commons. It is one of the principal documents of the way watercolour entered Japanese painting in the early Meiji decades, before the establishment of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1887 and before the wider availability of oil pigments through Yokohama trade.