Zuan shu ichi (Collection of Designs, vol. 1)

Zuan shu ichi, the opening volume of Tsuda Seifu's eight-volume Collection of Designs, was issued by the Kyoto publisher Honda Ichijiro in August 1900 and survives in the Rijksmuseum, where this impression is consulted through the museum's Wikimedia Commons holdings. The album collects color woodblock printed pattern sheets intended as reference material for Kyoto's kimono weavers, dyers, and design students, printed on bound paper with gold and silver pigments that signaled the deluxe quality of the publication. Tsuda was only twenty when the first volume appeared, recently graduated from training in the Kyoto School of Painting, and the album displays the ornamental vocabulary he had absorbed from late Meiji nihonga teachers, blended with the Art Nouveau-inflected sensibility then sweeping the Kyoto textile trades. The patterns are characterized by stylized floral and botanical motifs deployed in tight rhythmic repeats and balanced compositions that anticipate the structural concerns Tsuda would later carry into his Cezannist yoga oil paintings of the 1910s. The Zuan shu series circulated widely in Meiji design schools and helped fix the direction of Kyoto pattern design in the years around 1900. The Rijksmuseum impression preserves the crisp keyblock and the metallic pigment highlights that the Honda publishing house used to distinguish the album from competing pattern books, making it one of the more important documents of late Meiji period Japanese textile design.