Ōson (Hōitsu) Picture Album (Ōson gafu)

Ōson (Hōitsu) Picture Album, known by its Japanese title Ōson gafu (鶯邨画譜, "Warbler Village Picture Album"), is a woodblock-printed book in ink and color on paper published in 1817 and held by the Metropolitan Museum (accession JIB116). The album takes its name from Hōitsu's other principal sobriquet — Ōson, "Warbler Village," after the Negishi district of Edo where he established his studio — and disseminates his characteristic Rinpa subjects through the medium of polychrome woodblock printing. The pages reproduce the artist's bird-and-flower, seasonal, and figural compositions in carefully cut color blocks, transmitting the spare elegance of his painted idiom to a much wider audience than his original silk and paper works could reach. Published just two years after Hōitsu organized the centenary memorial exhibition for Ogata Kōrin and issued the first Kōrin hyakuzu (One Hundred Paintings by Kōrin) album, Ōson gafu was part of a deliberate project to consolidate the Edo Rinpa school's visual identity in the woodblock book market. Together these printed albums fixed the Rinpa pictorial canon for the nineteenth century and remain essential primary sources for the study of Hōitsu's compositions.