Butterflies and Autumn Grasses

Butterflies and Autumn Grasses is a leaf from the 1873 album in the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (accession 2001.16O). The pairing of butterflies with the akinanakusa — the seven autumn grasses of classical Japanese poetry (bush clover, susuki, kuzu vine, valerian, hagi, fujibakama, and kikyō) — is one of the most standard kachō-e subjects in Japanese painting, going back through Rinpa to the medieval and Heian poetic tradition that gave the autumn grasses their canonical poetic standing. Kansai works with the close insect observation that the Mori-Kishi school inherited from Mori Sosen and Kishi Ganku, rendering butterfly wing patterns, antennae, and abdomen segments with naturalist precision, while disposing the grasses in the long diagonals and asymmetric compositional balance that the school had refined. A second related leaf (2001.16P) extends the subject and may have been intended as a paired or sequential page within the album. Signed and dated 1873.