Flower Seller
花売り
- Date:
- before 1935
- Medium:
- Painting reproduction; ink and color on silk or paper
花売り
This painting of a flower seller (花売り, hana-uri), preserved through an early twentieth-century catalog reproduction now archived on Wikimedia Commons, depicts one of the recurring genre figures of late Meiji and Taishō painting: the itinerant vendor whose seasonal trade animated the streets of Kyoto and Tokyo. The flower seller, traditionally a young woman or older man carrying baskets of cut blooms on a shoulder pole, was a familiar subject for both nihonga and yōga painters of the period, valued for the way the figure compressed several characteristic interests of Meiji painting — the beauty of working women, the careful observation of natural seasonal subjects, and the picturesque qualities of unmodernized street life — into a single composition. Yamada Keichū's treatment, working within the Shijō naturalist tradition he absorbed under Kawabata Gyokushō, balances the figure of the seller against careful renderings of the flowers themselves, drawing on the kachō-e discipline that was his principal area of training. The catalog reproduction preserves the image in black-and-white photographic form, the original colors and brushwork lost to the medium but the composition and the artist's signature clearly legible. The work is representative of the genre painting Keichū produced for the Meiji-Taishō exhibition circuit, where such subjects sold reliably to the new urban middle-class collector base that was emerging in those decades.
風景 三
before 1935
Painting reproduction; ink and color on silk or paper
雪景色
before 1935
Painting reproduction; ink and color on silk or paper
山岳風景
before 1935
Painting reproduction; ink and color on silk or paper
山岳風景 二
before 1935
Painting reproduction; ink and color on silk or paper
Flower Seller (花売り) was created by Yamada Keichū (山田敬中) in before 1935.
Flower Seller depicts birds & flowers.
