Zuan shu hachi (Collection of Designs, vol. 8)

Zuan shu hachi, the closing volume of Tsuda Seifu's eight-volume Collection of Designs, was issued by the Kyoto publisher Honda Ichijiro in April 1901 and held today at the Rijksmuseum, where this impression is consulted through the museum's Wikimedia Commons holdings. The album completes the most ambitious of the design compendia Tsuda produced in his early twenties, before his 1908 departure for Paris and his subsequent reinvention as a yoga oil painter in the orbit of Cezanne. The bound color woodblock sheets, printed with gold and silver pigments by the Honda publishing house, served as reference material for Kyoto's kimono weavers, dyers, and design schools, then in the middle of an Art Nouveau inflected pattern revolution that swept the late Meiji textile industry. Across the eight volumes the program ranges from densely stylized floral motifs to abstract geometric borders, and by the final volume the designs show a confident command of negative space and rhythmic repetition that links the project both to traditional Japanese decorative syntax and to the European graphic ornament Tsuda would soon encounter in Paris. The Rijksmuseum preserves the album as part of the largest concentration of his early printed design work outside Japan, and Zuan shu hachi documents the Meiji period decorative vocabulary that informed everything from kimono dyeing to the Hototogisu magazine covers Tsuda would design a decade later.