Paulownias and Chrysanthemums

Paulownias and Chrysanthemums, a two-panel folding screen in ink and color on gilded paper from the early 1800s, is held by the Cleveland Museum of Art (accession 1964.386). The screen pairs two of the most heavily coded plant motifs in Japanese visual culture: the paulownia (kiri), historically associated with imperial authority and used as one of the principal Japanese imperial crests, and the chrysanthemum (kiku), the autumn flower long emblematic of literati refinement and the senior imperial crest. Painted in Sakai Hōitsu's mature Edo Rinpa manner, the composition spreads the paulownia leaves and chrysanthemum blossoms across the gold ground in the boldly asymmetric Kōrin idiom, with the foliage built up in soft tarashikomi pooling that lets pigment puddle and dry into the mottled surface characteristic of the school. The Cleveland Museum's catalogue dates the screen to the early 1800s, placing it within the first decade after Hōitsu's 1797 Buddhist ordination — the period when he was actively studying Kōrin's surviving works and consolidating the Edo Rinpa idiom that would define the school's nineteenth-century revival. The screen's combination of opulent gold ground and refined seasonal observation became one of the most influential conventions of late Edo decorative painting.