Spinning Wheel and Spools

Spinning Wheel and Spools is a surimono by Ryuryukyo Shinsai in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As a designer in the Hokusai school and a pupil of Katsushika Hokusai, Shinsai often turned to the implements of skilled hand work for the subjects of his privately commissioned surimono. Here a small spinning wheel is paired with its accompanying spools, the tools used to twist raw fiber into thread for sewing and weaving. The image celebrates the patient, productive labor of textile making, an activity associated in Edo-period culture with the disciplined virtues of women's work and with the household economy. Shinsai treats the apparatus with the precise observation characteristic of his master's school, recording the wheel's bracket, drive band, and rotating spindle as well as the bundled spools beside it. The print employs the lavish techniques typical of surimono: embossed blindprinting (karazuri) to model the carved wood and twisted fiber, soft color gradations across painted or lacquered components, and discreet metallic pigments. Privately commissioned by a kyoka poetry circle and distributed among its members at the New Year or another occasion, the surimono would have been accompanied by verses that played on themes of patience, accumulation, and the spinning out of days. The print exemplifies Shinsai's ability to find rich poetic resonance in tools normally regarded as utilitarian, in keeping with the surimono tradition's love of the modest and the meticulously observed. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/54101.