Soken Picture Album: The Plant Section (Soken gafu: Sōka no bu)

Soken Picture Album: The Plant Section (素絢画譜 草花之部, Soken gafu: Sōka no bu), published in Kyoto in Bunka 4 (1807), is the plant-and-flower volume of Yamaguchi Soken's second printed album. Where the Yamato jinbutsu gafu of 1799-1804 concentrated on human figures, the Soken gafu extends Soken's ehon practice across the natural-history subjects that the Maruyama-Shijō school had inherited from Ōkyo and Goshun: seasonal flowering plants, grasses, vegetables, and the small companion creatures (birds, butterflies, frogs) that animate Kyoto kachō-e tradition. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's copy (accession 2013.828) is a single-volume black-and-white woodblock book carrying Soken's signature and seal at the colophon. The plates draw on the close observation of plants that Ōkyo had institutionalized in his Kyoto studio — life-size sketching of cut specimens, careful attention to leaf venation and petal structure, and asymmetric compositions that allow each motif to breathe against generous negative space. Soken's line in this album is more relaxed than in his figure work, with thicker brushed contours and softer transitions, anticipating the brush-influenced kachō-e style that would dominate Kyoto Shijō painting in the early nineteenth century under Matsumura Keibun and Kishi Renzan.