Flowers and Birds (Peaches and Cranes)
桃に鶴図
by Taki Katei
- Date:
- 19th century (mid-Meiji)
- Medium:
- Album of twelve leaves; ink and color on silk
桃に鶴図
by Taki Katei
Flowers and Birds (Peaches and Cranes) is an album of twelve leaves in ink and color on silk by Taki Katei, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number 1975.282.1a-m). The album, acquired by the Met in 1975, is one of the most important groups of Katei's bird-and-flower paintings in any Western collection, and a key document of the densely worked, Ming- and Qing-derived kachō-e style that he developed across his Tokyo career. The twelve leaves carry standard auspicious subjects from the East Asian bird-and-flower tradition — peaches, cranes, plum blossoms, and other motifs charged with longevity and seasonal symbolism — rendered in the meticulous saimitsuga (細密画, fine-detail painting) manner that became Katei's late-career signature. Each leaf functions as an independent composition while contributing to the album's larger thematic structure, a format that descends from the great Chinese album-painting tradition of the Ming and Qing dynasties and that Katei adapted for the Meiji-period painting and connoisseurship market. As a coherent and dated body of Katei's small-format painting practice, the Met album is widely cited in scholarship on the late nineteenth-century Japanese literati tradition.
Flowers and Birds (Peaches and Cranes) (桃に鶴図) was created by Taki Katei (滝和亭) in 19th century (mid-Meiji).
Flowers and Birds (Peaches and Cranes) depicts birds & flowers.
