Camellias (Tsubaki)

Camellias (椿, Tsubaki), painted around 1924 and now in the Pola Museum of Art in Hakone, is one of the most accomplished of Kishida Ryūsei's flower paintings and a key still life of his later career. By 1924 Kishida had left Kugenuma for Kyoto in the wake of the Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1923, and his painting had begun absorbing nihonga influences from Song and Yuan Chinese painting and from the early [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) tradition. The Camellias picture preserves the Northern Renaissance attention to flower texture, leaf gloss, and stem structure that had defined his Kugenuma still lifes, but begins to admit the more decorative compositional habits of Japanese flower painting. The camellia is a heavily loaded flower in Japanese visual tradition — associated with the early new year, with samurai poetry, and with seasonal painting — and Kishida's choice of it for one of his last great flower paintings places the picture deliberately within an indigenous lineage rather than the imported European still-life tradition. The Pola Museum of Art holds the painting as part of its strong Taishō and Shōwa yōga collection.