Utensils for Tea and a Cake-Bowl

This Metropolitan Museum of Art print, identified as Utensils for Tea and a Cake-Bowl and dated to the nineteenth century, is a surimono — a privately-commissioned woodblock print, usually small in format and lavish in production, often featuring metallic pigments, embossing, and high-quality paper. The Met catalogues the work as a surimono in ink and color on paper. Surimono were typically commissioned by poetry circles (kyoka groups) for distribution among their members at New Year or other occasions, and they often paired a still life or seasonal image with kyoka verses. The subject here — tea utensils and a cake bowl, the apparatus of an elegant private gathering — is exactly the kind of refined still-life motif favored by surimono patrons. Eizan was a respected surimono designer, and this print demonstrates the technical demands and intimate scale of the genre, distinct from his commercial bijin-ga production but central to the prestige of his career.