Plum Blossom Designs by Five Artists (collaborative surimono)

Plum Blossom Designs by Five Artists is a collaborative Shijō-school [surimono](/glossary/surimono) dated Kaei 6 (1853, spring), produced for a Kyoto poetry society and bringing together designs by five senior Kyoto painters of the period — Yokoyama Seiki, Gantai (岸岱), Kitagawa Saigyō, Kishi Renzan, and Onishi Bunrin — each contributing a plum-blossom motif and signing the section he had drawn. Printed in horizontal format and inscribed with nineteen haiku and six kyōka, the sheet is one of the more elaborate collaborative surimono of the late Edo period and documents the social networks that linked Kyoto's leading painting studios with the city's literary circles. The plum (ume), the first major flower of the Japanese year, was a standard early-spring motif charged with Chinese literati associations of resilience and renewal, and a project that called for five plum studies on a single sheet provided the painters with an opportunity to display the variety of approaches the Shijō and related Kyoto schools brought to a shared subject. The Minneapolis Institute of Art copy (P.77.27.16) entered the collection through the Mr. and Mrs. Samuel H. Maslon gift fund and is signed by Seiki at the right (Seiki ga, "painted by Seiki"). The print is an important record of Seiki's standing among the senior Kyoto painters of the early 1850s and of the surimono trade's continuing role in mid-nineteenth-century Kyoto cultural life.