Kinkadō's Album of Drawings by Keibun (Keibun Kinka chō)

Kinkadō's Album of Drawings by Keibun (Keibun Kinka chō, 景文錦華帖) is a Meiji-period woodblock-printed accordion-format album (orihon), published in Kyoto in 1898 (Meiji 31, seventh month), reproducing bird-and-flower sketches by Matsumura Keibun (1779-1843) more than half a century after his death. The album was issued by the Kyoto publisher Kinkadō under the supervision of the Shijō painting community that traced its lineage back through Keibun to his elder brother Matsumura Goshun and to the Maruyama school of Maruyama Ōkyo. Its plates gather the small kachō-e subjects on which Keibun's reputation as the most skilled Kyoto bird-and-flower painter of the early nineteenth century rested — sparrows, nightingales, quails, herons, crickets, butterflies, and the seasonally specific flowering plants that the genre demanded — and present them in the format of a painting manual, with each composition designed to be studied as a model for amateur and professional Kyoto painters alike. The Metropolitan Museum's copy (accession 2013.753) is an unusually well-preserved example of late Meiji color woodblock book production, demonstrating both Keibun's pictorial vocabulary and the durability of his designs across the long arc from Bunsei-era Kyoto painting to Meiji-period nihonga.