Large-Format Flowers, Volume Two: Peonies (Zōkei Kaben Chō - ni)

The second volume of Zōkei Kaben Chō (Large-Format Flowers, ni), dated 20 April 1926 and bound in a green leporello cover, is the heart of Tanigami Kōnan's three-volume album and is devoted entirely to peonies. The Rijksmuseum's copy (RP-P-2005-623B) preserves fourteen leaves: a contents page facing the title, twelve double-page color woodblock images of peonies, and a closing colophon identifying Yamada Naosaburō as both printer and publisher and naming Tanigami as the designer. Each peony spread opens to roughly fifty centimeters wide and stages a single bloom or pair of blooms against an untreated washi ground, the bare paper giving the printed petals their assertive scale and the leaf masses their authority. Kōnan worked in conscious dialogue with the Maruyama-Shijō botanical tradition he had absorbed from Kōno Bairei and with the broader Kyoto interest in scientifically informed kachō-e that flourished in the late Meiji and Taishō eras. The technical accomplishment of the volume is remarkable: the carvers translated each petal's gathered ruffle into a separate keyblock element, and the Yamada printers pulled overlay bokashi gradations from deep crimson through pale rose and into cream-white, with the green of the leaves picked up in a darker overlay along the central vein. The peony, with its imperial and scholarly associations in Chinese and Japanese painting, was the perfect subject for Kōnan's ambition: a flower large enough to fill an entire spread and culturally weighted enough to justify the monumental treatment. The Rijksmuseum impression is among the finest documented examples and demonstrates the apex of Kōnan's collaboration with Yamada.