Fan-Box with Fans

Fan-Box with Fans is a still-life surimono by Totoya Hokkei, a designer of privately commissioned prints in early nineteenth-century Edo and one of the most prominent pupils of Katsushika Hokusai. The image presents a lacquered fan box from which several folding fans extend in different states of opening, their painted leaves visible at varying angles. Hokkei treats the assembly as a careful exercise in geometry, arranging the wedge-shaped fan profiles around the rectangular box so that the eye moves between the closed neatness of the case and the spreading patterns of the open fans. Each fan carries a small picture, allowing Hokkei to display a sampler of decorative motifs: a sprig of plum, a wave pattern, a landscape fragment. The fan box itself is suggested with restrained line, its lacquer surface registered through the simple contrast of dark planes. Such compositions belong to the New Year gift-giving culture of Edo. Fans, both as practical objects and as supports for painting and poetry, were exchanged in the season, and a fan box loaded with finely decorated fans suggested abundance and cultivation. The sheet would have been commissioned by a kyoka poetry club for distribution with accompanying verses, printed in a small edition on hosho paper with metallic pigments and blind embossing. Hokkei's name was associated with refined still-lifes in the Hokusai school manner, and his fan compositions show his command of pattern design and his confident handling of overlapping forms. The print is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and exemplifies the elegant decorative idiom of the early nineteenth-century surimono.