Still Life with Vase, Blossoming Branch, and Beets

Still Life with Vase, Blossoming Branch, and Beets is a color woodblock print by Taki Katei, dated about 1880-1890, held by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (accession RP-P-1961-125) as part of the thirty-nine-print octagonal album donated in 1961. The print measures 22.3 by 28.7 cm and represents a less-common subject within Katei's repertoire: the Chinese-style scholar's still life (qinggong, "pure offering"), in which a porcelain or bronze vase holding a flowering branch is paired with vegetables, fruit, or other domestic objects to create a composition charged with literati restraint and quiet seasonal elegance. The pairing of blossoming branch (likely plum, the harbinger of early spring) with beets — a modest root vegetable used in everyday Japanese cooking — gives the composition a deliberate plain-living quality that echoes the Chinese qinggong tradition of celebrating the unadorned domestic object. Katei's careful drawing of the vase's profile, the branch's blossoms, and the beets' leaves and roots within the small octagonal print format demonstrates the breadth of his subject matter and his command of the literati still-life vocabulary inherited from Ming and Qing painting.