Cherry Flowers

Cherry Flowers is a [surimono](/glossary/surimono) — a privately commissioned, lavishly printed woodblock sheet — by Kikuchi Yōsai (菊池容斎, 1788-1878), dated to the nineteenth century and held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession JP2133). The format is unusual within Yōsai's output: he is best known for hanging scrolls, monochrome historical-figure drawings, and his decades-long Zenken kojitsu project rather than for commercial or kyōka-circle prints. Surimono, however, were closely tied to the literary and antiquarian circles in which a painter of Yōsai's interests circulated, and the small, refined print on paper format — here approximately 14.6 by 19.4 centimeters — was a natural vehicle for the kind of restrained seasonal subject he favored. The image of cherry blossoms belongs to the spring and to the long courtly tradition of flower viewing (hanami), one of the seasonal motifs that recurs across Yōsai's late hanging-scroll work as well. The Met source confirms the attribution and the surimono format; as a small-scale, ink-and-color woodblock sheet by a painter chiefly known in other media, the print is a valuable witness to the range of formats in which Yōsai's brush idiom circulated within the literary culture of late-Edo and early-Meiji Edo and Tokyo.