Butterflies and Autumn Grasses
蝶秋草図
by Mori Kansai
- Date:
- 1873
- Medium:
- Album leaf; ink and color on silk
蝶秋草図
by Mori Kansai
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.
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Woodblock print diptych (surimono); ink and color on paper with metallic pigments
梅花小禽図
1873
Album leaf; ink and color on silk
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Album leaf; ink and color on silk
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1950
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Woodblock print, ink and color on paper
Butterflies and Autumn Grasses (蝶秋草図) was created by Mori Kansai (森寛斎) in 1873.
Butterflies and Autumn Grasses depicts autumn foliage.