Painting of Peacocks, Pines, a Waterfall, and a Roll of Red Fabric

This surimono by Totoya Hokkei depicts a hanging scroll painting that itself shows peacocks beneath pine trees beside a waterfall, with a roll of red fabric placed nearby as if newly delivered to the room of a discerning collector. By framing the painting within his own print, Hokkei creates a small joke about reproduction and connoisseurship: the surimono treats the inner scroll as an object to be admired alongside the cloth, suggesting an interior in which both painting and textile are objects of pride. The peacock-and-pine subject is closely associated with the Kano school and Chinese-derived court painting, and the elements that compose the scroll, peacocks, pines, and a cascading waterfall, are all emblems of longevity and prosperity. Hokkei, a pupil of Katsushika Hokusai and a leading Hokusai school designer of surimono, treats the inner painting with delicacy, the pines and birds rendered in muted greens and blues so that the saturated red of the rolled cloth functions as the visual anchor of the whole sheet. The roll of red fabric refers to silk presented as a luxury gift, again pointing to the world of polite exchange in which surimono themselves circulated. The print would have been issued in a small private edition for a kyoka poetry circle, the accompanying verses playing on themes of refined taste or material abundance. The sheet is preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and demonstrates Hokkei's interest in reflexive subjects that frame existing pictorial conventions within the intimate, decorative idiom of the privately commissioned Edo print.