Stitched fukusa and needle and thread

Catalogued by the Art Institute of Chicago with a year of 1876 and a circa-1881 date, this surimono depicts a fukusa - a stitched silk gift cover - together with a needle and thread, the implements of its making. The image is a small still life of intimate, even domestic objects, a subject Zeshin returned to often in surimono. The fukusa would have carried personal and seasonal associations for the kyoka poets who commissioned the print, and the inclusion of the needle and thread brings craft and tactile materiality into the foreground. Zeshin's compositions of this period typically pair a single carefully observed object with verses arranged in clean upper-register blocks, and his block-cutters were able to reproduce his soft brush textures and gradations of color with remarkable fidelity. The sheet is in the Art Institute of Chicago's collection; the museum's combined date attribution reflects the cataloguing complexity of late surimono, which were sometimes printed in editions slightly later than the calligraphy and design suggest.