Cherry and Maple Trees

Cherry and Maple Trees, a pair of six-panel folding screens in ink, color, and gold leaf on paper from the early 1820s, is one of Sakai Hōitsu's most accomplished late screen compositions and is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 2018.55.1, .2). The pairing of spring cherry blossom and autumn maple — sakura and momiji — is one of the oldest and most evocative seasonal juxtapositions in Japanese art, treated by Hōitsu here in his fully developed Edo Rinpa idiom. Across each screen the trees rise from low ground in the bold diagonal Rinpa compositional habit, their trunks rendered in the wet-on-wet tarashikomi ink-pooling technique that Hōitsu inherited from Ogata Kōrin and Sōtatsu and refined into a hallmark of the Edo school. Against an unbroken gold leaf ground the blossoms and maple leaves are tipped with carefully observed pigment, each branch carrying a precise botanical attention drawn from Hōitsu's bunjin studies. Painted in the years just before Hōitsu's 1828 death, the screens distil the mature Edo Rinpa sensibility: opulent yet restrained, decorative yet lyrical, openly conversing with Kōrin's century-earlier idiom while remaining unmistakably a product of late Edo connoisseurial culture.