Prow of a Boat, from the Aomomiji (Blue Maple Leaves) series

Prow of a Boat, from the Aomomiji (Blue Maple Leaves) series, is a color woodblock print with silver powder produced by Tsuda Seifu around 1905 and held today at the Rijksmuseum, where this impression is consulted through the museum's Wikimedia Commons holdings. The Aomomiji series belongs to the design publications Tsuda undertook for the Kyoto publisher Honda Ichijiro in the years immediately following his eight-volume Zuan shu compendium of 1900-1901, and it extends the same Meiji period ornamental vocabulary into smaller pictorial subjects rather than pure pattern. Here Tsuda crops his composition to a single arresting motif: the carved wooden prow of a boat, isolated against a quiet ground that the silver powder activates with a cool muted shimmer. The flat patterning that defined his contemporary kimono design work is carried over into the treatment of the prow's structural lines, but the subject reads as a near abstract study of form, a pictorial experiment by a designer who would soon travel to Paris and translate similar structural ambitions into oil. The Aomomiji series is one of the more inventive products of Tsuda's late Meiji period Kyoto career, and the Rijksmuseum impression preserves the silver powder highlights and the crisp keyblock that distinguish the publisher's color woodblock work in this period.