Plant and Seals

Plant and Seals is a hanging scroll by Yokoyama Seiki in ink on paper, dated 1856 in the late Bakumatsu period and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 2015.500.9.68, Gift of Florence and Herbert Irving, 2015). The painting belongs to a Kyoto tradition of literati and Shijō works combining a study of plant forms with carefully placed seals that read as part of the composition rather than as marginal authentication marks. As an example of Seiki's mature work in the formal painting medium — produced eight years before his death and at a moment when he was among the senior figures in Kyoto's Shijō painting world — it shows his command of the school's restrained ink technique applied to a botanical subject with literati overtones. The use of seals within the picture surface places the work in dialogue with the long East Asian tradition of seal-impression catalogues (印譜, inpu) and with the Bakumatsu Kyoto vogue for paintings that doubled as scholarly objects suitable for circulation within a network of cultivated owners. The work entered the Metropolitan as part of the major gift of the Irving collection, one of the most substantial holdings of Japanese painting and decorative art assembled in twentieth-century America.