Three Flowers in Snow (Centre Scroll)

Three Flowers in Snow, Centre Scroll (雪中三花図) is the central panel of Matsumoto Fūko's hanging-scroll triptych on the winter-flowering subject, executed in ink and colour on silk. The central scroll is the compositional anchor of the set, traditionally bearing the largest of the three plants and the principal seasonal motif — here the camellia, a flower whose dark green leaves and red blossoms had long been associated with the depth of winter in Japanese painting and poetry. Fūko works in the disciplined manner he had carried forward from his apprenticeship under Kikuchi Yōsai and refined through his fifty-year independent career: brushwork on the branches built up in graded ink wash, snow rendered through reserved silk ground rather than applied white pigment, colour applied selectively to the blossoms and the principal leaves. The triptych as a whole sits within the broader programme of seasonal painting that Fūko maintained throughout his life — his Taishō-period Twelve-Months Series at the Ibaraki Prefectural Museum of Modern Art is the most ambitious surviving expression of this side of his practice — and demonstrates that even the major late-Meiji rekishiga painters continued to work the traditional kachō-ga repertoire of the Kanō and Tosa schools they had inherited.