Shodana to Fuzukue to Ume (Plum Branches Beside Bookshelves and Desk)

An interior still life in the literati manner by Yajima Gōgaku, this print arranges a scholar's bookshelves, a low writing desk, and a sparse branch of blossoming plum into the kind of compressed domestic vignette that nanga painters of the late Bunka era developed as a vehicle for the cultivated taste of the bunjin study. The plum branch, blooming in the first weeks of the lunar new year, carried multiple associations - early spring, scholarly virtue, the Chinese poet Lin Bu - and was a standard motif of bunjinga painting and poetry. The bookshelves and writing desk denote the studio of a literatus, identified by what he reads and owns rather than by his face. Gōgaku's restrained palette and emphasis on calligraphic line set the work firmly in the nanga register. The small sheet, roughly 18 by 22 centimetres, was issued between 1810 and 1820.