Carnation

The carnation, with its dense frilled petals and spicy fragrance, was a fashionable flower in both European and Japanese upper-class interiors of the Taisho period, and Kazuma renders it in this 1922 color lithograph with the confident touch of an artist who understood Western floral painting and could adapt its sensibility to the Japanese printmaking tradition. Each petal's overlapping form and the flower's characteristic striped or solid color are rendered through lithography's ability to lay down smooth washes of color, the bouquet building into a composition of layered, saturated warmth.