Violet Wisteria (Shifuji)

Violet Wisteria (Shifuji, 紫藤) is a hanging-scroll painting by Tamamura Hokuto, signed with his birth name Tamamura Zennosuke, in colors and some gold on paper (46.9 × 55.5 cm). Although undated, the work is assigned to the first half of the twentieth century and shows the painter working in a classical kachō-e (bird-and-flower) idiom: cascading wisteria racemes against neutral ground, with the long pendant flowers traced in graduated washes of violet and white pigment and the leaves and stems built up in restrained ink and gold. Wisteria (fuji) is one of the canonical late-spring subjects of Japanese painting and poetry, associated with the Fujiwara family crest and with the great wisteria-viewing seasons of Kyoto and Nara. The composition reflects the Maruyama-Shijō training Hokuto received from Kikuchi Hōbun at the Kyoto Municipal Painting College in the early 1910s, and may belong either to his early Inten exhibition years (1915-1923) or to his nihonga revival period after the founding of the Hokuto-sha in 1930. The work is in a private collection (Oranda Jin, 's-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands) and is one of the few signed paintings under his given name Zennosuke to circulate in the international market.