Plum Branch

Plum Branch, dating to the late eighteenth century, is a surimono color woodblock print held by the Art Institute of Chicago. Surimono - literally "printed thing" - were privately commissioned prints, typically produced for poetry circles and distributed among members on auspicious occasions, often New Year. They used the most luxurious printing techniques available: thick paper, lavish use of metallic pigments, gauffrage (blind embossing), and the most refined color work, and they almost always combined an image with one or more kyoka (comic-poetry) inscriptions. The plum branch was a perennial New Year subject, evoking the season's first flowering, perseverance through winter, and aristocratic literary association. Shigemasa's surimono production reflects his integration into the kyoka poetry circles of late-eighteenth-century Edo and his standing as a calligrapher and literary man as much as a popular print designer. The surimono format, smaller and less easily commercial than oban prints, has often suffered greater attrition over the centuries, making the Art Institute of Chicago's preservation of this example particularly valuable for the study of Shigemasa's private-commission work.