Autumn leaves

Brilliant autumn foliage fills this oban woodblock print by Komura Settai, its reds and golds rendered through the layered color impressions of the shin-hanga process. Autumn leaves hold a central place in Japanese aesthetics, celebrated in poetry since the Man'yoshu anthology and woven into textile, lacquer, and painting traditions for over a millennium. Settai treats the subject with his typical economy of line, allowing the color itself to carry the emotional weight of the season's brief, intense beauty. The composition likely draws on the momijigari tradition of leaf viewing, translating the experience of standing beneath a canopy of maples into the compressed space of a woodblock print.