Literati Painting the Plum Flowers

Ryuryukyo Shinsai's undated surimono Literati Painting the Plum Flowers takes up the long-standing East Asian theme of the bunjin, the literatus-artist who paints the plum as an emblem of cultivated reclusion. The print belongs to a tradition of mitate-e that allowed kyoka poets and their illustrators to align themselves, half in earnest and half in play, with the prestige of classical Chinese scholar-painting. Shinsai renders the figure with the controlled brushlike line he learned from Hokusai, but the composition's quiet asymmetry and decorative attention to surface owe more to his earlier training under Tawaraya Sori. The plum branch, executed with careful gradations of color and likely some embossed relief in the original impression, sits as both subject of the painting within the print and as the seasonal anchor for the kyoka verse that accompanied the design. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the print as part of its outstanding surimono collection.