Blossoming Cherry Trees

Blossoming Cherry Trees, a pair of six-panel folding screens painted in ink, color, and gold leaf on paper around 1805, is one of the early masterpieces of Sakai Hōitsu's mature Edo Rinpa style and entered the Metropolitan Museum (accession 2015.300.93.1, .2) as part of the Mary Griggs Burke Collection. Painted within a decade of Hōitsu's 1797 Buddhist ordination and during the period when he was systematically studying Ogata Kōrin's surviving works, the screens transpose the Rinpa school's signature subject — flowering trees set against an unbroken gold ground — into a cooler, more atmospheric register. The cherry trunks twist diagonally across the gilded surface in the boldly asymmetric Kōrin manner, but the blossoms themselves are painted with a delicate botanical precision drawn from Hōitsu's bunjin training, each cluster softly graded rather than flatly applied. The Metropolitan Museum's online catalogue places the screens at the threshold of Hōitsu's emergence as the de facto head of the Edo Rinpa revival; the work's combination of opulent gold ground and refined seasonal observation became one of the defining visual signatures of nineteenth-century Japanese decorative painting.