Red and White Plum Blossoms with Poem Slip

Dated to about 1810, Red and White Plum Blossoms with Poem Slip is one of Shinsai's most concentrated still-life surimono, a composition reduced to a branch of red and white plum and a tanzaku (poem slip) hanging from one of its twigs. The pairing is exemplary of the surimono logic: the print depicts the very object on which a kyoka would be written, and the verses that accompanied the design likely played on the relationship between the depicted poem slip and the actual kyoka inscribed on the print's surface. The composition's reduction to a single branch and a single rectangular slip allowed the printer to lavish technical effort on color modulation and embossing, and the print is one of the clearest examples of how the surimono medium aligned image, object, and text into a single conceptual unit. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the impression.