Specialities of Bizen Province

Specialities of Bizen Province, by Yashima Gakutei, is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and reflects the recurrent interest in regional products (meibutsu) that characterized Edo-period print culture. Bizen Province, in what is now Okayama Prefecture, was celebrated for several specialities, most notably Bizen ware, the unglazed stoneware fired in the long-burning anagama kilns that gave the pottery its distinctive russet and silver surfaces, as well as Bizen swords, agricultural produce, and salt. Meibutsu prints functioned as both poetic souvenirs and proto-tourism: they allowed urban audiences to imagine the products of distant provinces and to celebrate them in verse. As a designer within the Hokusai school, trained by Katsushika Hokusai and active in Edo and Osaka [surimono](/glossary/surimono) workshops, Yashima Gakutei worked with kyoka poets who often produced verses linking regional products to seasonal or commemorative occasions. The surimono format permitted the technical refinements that gave Gakutei's prints their reputation: metallic pigments, embossed surfaces, and meticulous registration of inscribed text. The Hokusai school's compositional discipline organized the regional motifs into a coherent decorative whole. The Metropolitan's holdings of Gakutei's meibutsu surimono complement his celebrated landscape series such as Famous Places in Osaka: Fine Views of Mount Tenpo, illustrating how the surimono format accommodated both grand topographical themes and the more intimate celebration of provincial production within the same artistic vocabulary.