Zuan shu go (Collection of Designs, vol. 5)

Zuan shu go, the fifth volume of Tsuda Seifu's Collection of Designs, was issued by the Kyoto publisher Honda Ichijiro during 1900-1901 as part of the eight-volume series of pattern albums that established the young designer's reputation in Meiji period Kyoto. The Rijksmuseum holds the volume as part of its concentration of Tsuda's early printed design work, and this impression is consulted via the museum's Wikimedia Commons holdings. The bound album collects color woodblock printed pattern sheets intended for the Kyoto textile industry, and Honda printed the designs with gold and silver pigments to mark the publication as a luxury reference object. Tsuda would have been twenty when the series began, working out of the ornamental tradition he had absorbed at the Kyoto School of Painting and absorbing in parallel the Art Nouveau current then sweeping the city's kimono weavers and dyers. By the fifth volume the program had matured: the patterns operate with confident graphic flatness, balancing stylized natural forms against geometric framing devices in compositions that combine traditional Japanese design syntax with the rhythmic repetition characteristic of European Art Nouveau. The Zuan shu volumes circulated widely in Meiji design schools and were among the most influential pattern publications of their decade. Long before Tsuda traveled to Paris and reinvented himself as a yoga oil painter in the orbit of Cezanne, this volume captures him operating at the heart of the late Meiji Kyoto design world.