Camellia Flowers (left); People Watching a Cockfight (right)
- Date:
- ca. 1820
- Medium:
- Woodblock print (surimono); ink and color on paper
- Source:
- Metropolitan Museum of Art
Camellia Flowers (left); People Watching a Cockfight (right) is a surimono diptych by Ryuryukyo Shinsai in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dated to about 1810. The two sheets juxtapose a quiet study of camellia branches on the left with a small genre scene of spectators leaning over a cockfight on the right, an unusual pairing that lets Shinsai exercise both his still-life and his figural modes in a single commission. As a designer within the Hokusai school after his early training under Tawaraya Sori, Shinsai often produced surimono that compressed contrast into a single sheet, and the diptych format heightens that effect by setting natural elegance directly against urban excitement. The camellia panel uses sparse stems and weighted blossoms to evoke a contemplative interior, while the cockfight panel concentrates a group of figures around the implied combat at center, their postures and expressions sketched with the lively economy that Hokusai school draftsmen prized. Surimono printers used metallic pigments and blind embossing to lift the petals of the camellias and to register textile patterns in the crowd, and the disciplined palette ties the two panels together visually. The kyoka verses originally printed on the sheets would have built additional connections between the panels, perhaps reflecting on stillness and motion, or on the spectators' divided attentions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves the diptych as a striking example of Shinsai's range within the surimono format.
ca. 1830
Woodblock print (surimono); ink and color on paper
1880 - 1895
19th century
Part of an album of woodblock prints (surimono); ink and color on paper
1821
Color woodblock print; shikishiban, surimono
Camellia Flowers (left); People Watching a Cockfight (right) was created by Ryūryūkyo Shinsai (柳々居辰斎) in ca. 1820.
Camellia Flowers (left); People Watching a Cockfight (right) depicts birds & flowers.
