Japanese Dwarf Plum Tree

Japanese Dwarf Plum Tree, dated 1928, is one of the small group of close-focus botanical color woodcuts that Lilian May Miller produced at the height of her Tokyo and Kyoto period. The composition isolates a single bonsai-trained plum (ume) against a flat, lightly tinted ground, the gnarled trunk and sparse white blossoms reading as a kind of three-dimensional brushwork translated into the woodblock medium. The subject reflects Miller's deep absorption in the conservative literati and Kanō-school subjects that she had been trained in as a girl in Kanō Tomonobu's atelier — the ume is one of the canonical 'Four Gentlemen' of East Asian painting, along with bamboo, orchid and chrysanthemum — and the print stands as her most direct statement of allegiance to that tradition. The Art Institute of Chicago holds an impression (Japanese Dwarf Plum Tree, 1928, color woodcut on Asian paper), and the print became a staple of Miller's American demonstration tour of 1929-1930. Miller cut and printed the blocks herself in her Tokyo studio, and the precise registration of the white blossoms against the dark trunk demonstrates the technical command that distinguished her from every other Western shin-hanga artist of her generation.