Viewers at a Flower Exhibition
- Date:
- 1880-1890
- Medium:
- Color woodcut on paper (octagonal album sheet, black line block with color blocks)
- Source:
- Rijksmuseum
An octagonal color woodcut from a presentation album of thirty-nine sheets gifted to the Rijksmuseum by the Delft collector L.J. Boddaert in 1961 (accession RP-P-1961-113). The image depicts an elegant Meiji-era flower show — almost certainly one of the chrysanthemum or peony exhibitions that became fashionable in 1880s Tokyo — with a group of women in late-Meiji dress arranged in the shallow octagonal frame to view the cultivated plants set out for display. Shinsai's composition compresses a conventional ukiyo-e genre subject (the elegant outing to view flowers) into a small album-leaf format, with the black line-block defining the figures and architecture and a careful sequence of mineral color blocks filling in the kimono patterns, foliage, and architectural details. The same composition is recorded in the Paris dealer Collin-Estampes' archive with the alternate title 'Spectators at the flower show' and a dating of 1880-1886; the gallery attribution further identifies Ayaoka Yūshin (1846-1910) as the publisher of the album, placing this sheet squarely within the small group of Meiji octagonal-format presentation prints associated with the late-Edo Shibata-Ikeda studio circle. The print measures roughly 223 by 287 millimetres on Japanese paper and is held under the Rijksmuseum's CC0 public-domain dedication.
1880-1890
Color woodcut on paper (octagonal album sheet, black line block with color blocks)
1880-1890
Color woodcut on paper (octagonal album sheet, black line block with color blocks)
1880-1890
Color woodcut on paper (octagonal album sheet, black line block with color blocks)
Viewers at a Flower Exhibition was created by Shibata Shinsai (柴田真斎) in 1880-1890.
Viewers at a Flower Exhibition depicts birds & flowers.
