Flower Arranging

Flower Arranging is a circa 1769 chuban color woodblock print held by the Art Institute of Chicago. The chuban (medium) format, common in the late 1760s and early 1770s, accommodated the increased visual complexity of full polychrome nishiki-e while remaining smaller and less expensive than the oban sheets that would dominate the next generation. The print depicts the practice of ikebana - the formal arrangement of cut flowers - a refined art with deep ties to Buddhism, tea culture, and the cultivated household. By the late eighteenth century, ikebana was practiced by women across the urban middle and upper classes, and prints showing women arranging flowers spoke to both aesthetic sensibility and feminine accomplishment. Shigemasa, who illustrated several treatises on flower arranging, was particularly well placed to design such a subject; his elegant, dignified bijin-ga style, already maturing by 1769, treats the figure with calm verticality and quiet attention to the precise gestures of arrangement. The print belongs to the body of work in which Shigemasa was establishing the conventions of the tall, serene beauty that he would carry into the famous Seiro Bijin album with Shunsho a few years later.