Daffodil No. 4

The daffodil (suisen) is a winter and early-spring flower in Japan, blooming along coastal slopes from December through March, and has long occupied a place in literati painting and tea-ceremony flower arrangement. Sugiura's fourth Daffodil treats the subject with the same isolating discipline applied to his Iris, Peony, and Cosmos series — a single bloom or small cluster centered against neutral ground, the cup-and-petal structure rendered through clean contour and graded color fields. The flower's six tepals and prominent central corona offer a clear formal architecture that suits the artist's flat, decorative idiom, while the slender straplike leaves provide a vertical counterpoint to the rounded floral head. The print belongs to the broader postwar revival of kacho-e in which artists working across woodblock, silkscreen, and lithograph extended the Edo flower-print tradition into a modern decorative register. Compared with the Iris series, which runs well into the hundreds, the Daffodil sequence appears to be a more compact exploration rather than the sustained variations that characterize the artist's signature subjects.