Large-Format Flowers, Volume Three (Zōkei Kaben Chō - san)

The third and final volume of Zōkei Kaben Chō (Large-Format Flowers, san), dated 5 June 1926 and revised in 1929, completes Tanigami Kōnan's three-part album in a chestnut-purple leporello binding. The Rijksmuseum's copy (RP-P-2005-623C) preserves twelve leaves: a title page, a two-page contents listing, ten double-page color woodblock images, and a closing colophon naming Yamada Naosaburō of Kyoto as printer and publisher. Where the second volume confined itself to peonies, the third widens its subject matter across the seasonal cycle: spring blossoms, summer flowers, and the autumnal foliage of maples, dogwoods, and persimmons. Each subject is rendered at near life-size scale on an untreated washi ground in the manner Kōnan established in the earlier volumes — confident keyblock outline, restrained internal drawing, dense overlay polychrome — but here the artist allows himself a wider tonal range, particularly in the autumnal subjects where the leaves are pulled in deep madder, ochre, and umber against patches of bare paper that read both as space and as winter light. The volume confirms the breadth of Kōnan's botanical interests, which extended from the exotic Western flowers he later collected in his Seiyō Sōka Zufu album to the native flora of the Kyoto-Osaka region documented here. The Yamada workshop produced the impressions in the same saturated polychrome that distinguished volumes one and two, with bokashi gradations executed across multiple overlay impressions per image — a level of technical refinement matched in Kyoto kachō-e printing only by the contemporaneous Unsōdō house. The Rijksmuseum holds one of very few complete Kōnan sets in a European public collection.