Peony in Rain

This print, in the collection of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, depicts a single peony flower struck by a sudden rain — another instance of Shōda Kōhō's lifelong preoccupation with the moment when atmospheric weather intersects with a quiet natural subject. The peony is rendered in soft pinks and creams against a slightly damp grey-green ground; rain is suggested by faint diagonal lines descending across the upper portion of the image; and the foliage at the base of the flower is drawn in a restrained dark green. The composition is closely related to other Shōda flower-and-rain designs (notably A Sudden Shower on Cherry Blossoms), and the publisher attribution to Hasegawa-Nishinomiya is consistent with the rest of his documented output. The compositional language is sparing in the manner typical of the Hasegawa workshop: a single flower at the centre of the picture, atmospheric weather suggested by line rather than tone, and a wide unprinted washi margin around the subject that gives the design its quiet, breathable feeling. The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria is one of the few public collections outside the United States to hold a documented Shōda Kōhō print; the work entered the gallery through a donation of Japanese material from a Canadian collector earlier in the twentieth century and remains one of the strongest pieces in the gallery's modest holding of shin-hanga kacho-e. The print exemplifies the quiet, weather-driven kacho-e idiom that Shōda made his own across roughly three decades of work for the Hasegawa-Nishinomiya house.