A bag

Dated 1866, this small surimono by Shibata Zeshin depicts a bag - the kind of everyday object that fascinated kyoka poets and their illustrators, who routinely paired humble subjects with literary verse. The image is restrained and graphic: a folded or drawn-string bag rendered with a few quietly weighted lines, surrounded by kyoka poems set in the upper register. Zeshin had a particular gift for these unspectacular subjects, treating a pouch, a fan, a pair of scissors, or a teapot with the same compositional care that other artists reserved for grander subjects. Held in the Art Institute of Chicago's surimono collection, the sheet shows Zeshin working at the end of the Tokugawa period, two years before the Meiji Restoration, still moving comfortably within the literary and social circles that had supported privately commissioned printmaking since the early nineteenth century. The Edo print sources Zeshin learned from - and the printers and carvers he relied on for these editions - would change dramatically in the following decade, making sheets like this a witness to the last full flowering of the traditional Edo surimono.