Cherry Blossoms

Cherry Blossoms (Ōka, c. 1935) belongs to Kokei's late group of single-branch flowering-tree subjects, in which he returned with patient seriousness to the most classical of Japanese pictorial themes. The hanging scroll places a single horizontal branch of yamazakura cherry across the upper portion of the silk, with the blossoms opening from the tightly furled buds at the right toward the fully open, slightly worn flowers at the left. The colour palette is unusually narrow — the silk ground left bare, the petals laid down in the palest pinks and ivories, the branch in a slow grey-brown line — and the absence of any sky, foliage, or companion motif throws the entire visual weight onto the placement and intervals of the individual flowers. Cherry blossom subjects had become, by the 1930s, a slightly worn cliché of decorative nihonga, and Kokei's late treatments are notable for the way they restore quietness, restraint, and a faint melancholy to a subject that lesser painters were treating with festival ornament. The picture is held in a private collection.