Otafuku Holding a Branch of Double White Cherry Blossoms

Otafuku Holding a Branch of Double White Cherry Blossoms is a privately commissioned [surimono](/glossary/surimono) (woodblock-printed greeting card) of around 1840 by Watanabe Kazan (渡辺崋山, 1793-1841), held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession JP2636). Printed in ink and color on paper at the close of Kazan's life — almost certainly in the final year before his suicide in 1841 — the sheet brings the senior nanga painter's brush idiom into the small, intimate format of surimono. Otafuku, the round-cheeked comic deity of mirth and good fortune, holds a branch of yaezakura (double-flowered cherry blossom), pairing a popular folk figure with the season's most prestigious literary subject. The combination is characteristic of surimono, which were commissioned by poetry circles and given as luxurious New Year and seasonal gifts, often joining humorous figural imagery with refined botanical or literary motifs. As an artist Kazan is best known for the formal portraits and Western-influenced ink-and-color sketches that defined his mature practice, but his willingness to take on surimono commissions of this kind documents the breadth of his Edo professional network and the way leading literati painters circulated their work through the privately printed gift culture of the late 1830s and early 1840s. The Met sheet is a rare surviving example of Kazan's design in the medium.