Straw Hat for Tavel and Toys of Windmills

Straw Hat for Travel and Toys of Windmills is a surimono print by Ryuryukyo Shinsai in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dated to around 1800. The composition pairs a wide-brimmed travel hat with a cluster of children's pinwheel toys, joining two images that together evoke departure, festival, and the rhythms of seasonal travel. Working within the Hokusai school after his apprenticeship under Tawaraya Sori, Shinsai specialized in this kind of objet-still-life surimono, in which an apparently simple grouping of items resolves into a constellation of allusions for the kyoka poets who commissioned the sheet. The straw hat, with its tied cords and woven texture, is rendered with attention to the play of light across overlapping straw, while the windmill toys are turned at slightly different angles to imply movement and the breeze that drove them. Surimono printing typically employed luxury techniques such as metallic pigments and blind embossing, and prints from this period by Shinsai show a soft, dignified palette that suits the contemplative pairing of travel and play. The juxtaposition would have given poets a starting point for verses on themes of pilgrimage, springtime fairs, or the fleeting amusements of childhood. The Metropolitan's holdings of Shinsai surimono allow this sheet to be read alongside other small still lifes, showing how the Hokusai school extended the genre's range beyond figure subjects into a refined visual vocabulary of objects.