Gathering spring flowers

Held by the Art Institute of Chicago, Gathering Spring Flowers is a color woodblock surimono in the nagaban format, an unusually tall vertical sheet that suggests an early experiment in the deluxe surimono mode that would dominate Shunman's later career. The print depicts a quiet seasonal moment, women or children among the first blossoms of spring, treated with the slender, attenuated figures and restrained palette that mark Shunman's mature drawing. The nagaban shape, longer and narrower than the standard shikishiban surimono, gives the composition a scroll-like rhythm, encouraging the eye to travel slowly down the sheet and to read the integrated kyoka inscription as part of the picture rather than as decoration. As a privately commissioned print, Gathering Spring Flowers would have been distributed among the members of a kyoka circle as a New Year greeting, the early-spring subject matter reinforcing the auspicious occasion. Shunman uses soft, mineral-based pigments and likely included passages of blind embossing in the textiles and flowers - hallmarks of the surimono tradition, where the most expensive woodblock techniques were reserved for these small private editions. The print testifies to Shunman's dual identity as poet and designer: the kyoka are not captions to the image but partners in it, with the visual composition leaving deliberate breathing room for the calligraphy. Within the Art Institute of Chicago's exceptional surimono holdings, this work helps document the early years of a tradition that Shunman would help define through the 1810s.