White Plum

White Plum is a hanging-scroll painting by Tamamura Hokuto, dated to the 1930s, executed in ink and color on paper and held by the Honolulu Museum of Art (accession 2021-03-111). The composition presents a single white plum branch, a classic Japanese painting subject associated with the late-winter and early-spring sekki seasons and with centuries of literary and Zen iconography. The plum is rendered in the Maruyama-Shijō manner Hokuto had absorbed from his Kyoto teacher Kikuchi Hōbun, with carefully observed branch structure and restrained color, but the unusual narrow proportions (133 × 32.4 cm) and the way the branch is allowed to cut across the picture plane in a sharp diagonal show the influence of the modernist composition Hokuto had absorbed during his 1920s engagement with Sanka and the Tokyo avant-garde. The painting belongs to the period after he founded the Hokuto-sha (Hokuto Society) in 1930, when he returned to nihonga with the explicit aim of reconceiving the medium rather than abandoning it. Acquired by Honolulu in 2021, the work is one of relatively few examples of Hokuto's mature painting practice in an American public collection.