New Year’s Feast on Portable Dinner Tables

New Year's Feast on Portable Dinner Tables is a surimono print by Ryuryukyo Shinsai in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dated to about 1816. The composition lays out the small individual lacquered tables and their burdens of dishes, sake cups, and seasonal foods that defined the elite Edo New Year banquet, treating an entire celebration as a sculptural still life. As a designer within the Hokusai school after his training under Tawaraya Sori, Shinsai used surimono to portray such ceremonies with documentary precision, identifying each component clearly while integrating it into a balanced composition. The lacquer tables provide strong rectangular volumes that anchor the design, while the food, bowls, and pourers introduce smaller, varied silhouettes whose colors are keyed to the surimono palette of muted reds, browns, and gleaming metallic accents. Embossing was likely used to mark the polished surfaces of the trays and the cordage of decorative knots, the kind of refinement that distinguished surimono from commercial nishiki-e. The kyoka verses originally printed on the sheet would have transformed the still life into a sequence of toasts, evoking the speeches and exchanges traditional to such gatherings. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves this sheet alongside other Shinsai New Year subjects, where it stands as one of his most thorough depictions of holiday hospitality and shows the Hokusai school's enthusiasm for the choreography of everyday ceremony.