Hydrangea

Hydrangea (Ajisai, c. 1937) is one of the late hanging-scroll compositions in which Kokei brought his decades-long study of bird-and-flower painting to bear on the deeply Japanese rainy-season subject of the hydrangea. The picture places a single round head of ajisai — its many small four-petalled flowers ranged in a soft mass — against a near-empty silk ground, with the broad serrated leaves of the plant given just enough body to anchor the composition in the lower third of the scroll. The colour gradation across the flower head, from cool blue through violet to a faint pink, is achieved by careful layering of mineral pigments rather than by any wet-on-wet wash, and the line of the leaf veins is performed with the same patient evenness that had characterised Kokei's drawing since his earliest historical subjects. The painting is held today in the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum and is representative of the entirely settled late style that Kokei would carry through into the post-war years and the Person of Cultural Merit period.