Flowers and Grasses of Autumn

Flowers and Grasses of Autumn is a hanging scroll by Yamamoto Baiitsu in ink and color on silk, signed and dated to the eighth month of 1843, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 2015.300.188). Painted in Baiitsu's sixtieth year, the scroll belongs to the deep core of late-Edo nanga bird-and-flower tradition: a vertical arrangement of bush clover, susuki (Japanese silver grass), patrinia, chrysanthemum, and the other plants of the seasonal repertoire known as akinanakusa (the seven autumn flowers of classical Japanese poetry), painted with the literary self-consciousness expected of a scholar-painter steeped in both classical waka and Chinese verse. Baiitsu deploys the "boneless" (mokkotsu) wash technique to build the soft autumn foliage and to register the subtle color gradations of the season, while his brushed inscription places the picture within the literati conventions of dated, seal-signed scholar-painting. The scroll was given to the Met in 2015 as part of the Mary Griggs Burke Collection and stands as one of the canonical examples of his autumn-themed kachō-ga (bird-and-flower) production.