Irises

Irises is a diptych of hanging scrolls in ink and color on silk, dated to the mid-1850s and preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The pair of scrolls together compose a single extended composition of iris blossoms, with the diptych format echoing the bipartite organization of Kōrin's celebrated screen pairs while adapting that structure to the more intimate scale of the hanging scroll. The iris was the defining motif of the Rinpa school, and Kiitsu's return to it in his late period was both a homage to the founding generation and an assertion of his own command of the tradition.

The composition demonstrates Kiitsu's mature handling of the Rinpa idiom: the blossoms are rendered with crisp outlines and saturated blue pigment, the long sword-shaped leaves are arranged in counterposed diagonals that thread across the picture surface, and the entire arrangement is organized through the interplay between the flat patterning of leaf groups and the focused incidents of individual blossoms. The diptych format requires that the composition read as both two separate scrolls and a single continuous design when displayed together, and Kiitsu manages this dual reading by carrying motifs across the boundary while keeping each scroll independently complete.

Dating to a period close to the end of Kiitsu's life, the work shows the consolidated style of his final years and stands as one of the most thoroughly realized treatments of the Rinpa iris motif in the nineteenth century, a work in which the late-Edo Rinpa tradition reaches a point of refined classical statement.