Cyclamen

Cyclamen is a botanical color woodblock print by Yoshijiro Urushibara, a still life that shows the more intimate, decorative side of his output alongside his better-known European cityscapes. Urushibara worked for most of his career in London after settling there following the 1910 Japan-British Exhibition, and through his long Frank Brangwyn collaboration he developed a manner of printing flowers and plants that drew on the still-life conventions of British and Belgian painting while keeping the layered transparency of Japanese woodblock pigment. In this image the cyclamen's nodding flowers and patterned heart-shaped leaves are arranged as a self-contained study, with the background reduced to a quiet field of colour so that the plant reads almost as a specimen plate. The visible grain of the block in the leaves and petals, and the soft halo where one pigment meets another, are characteristic of Urushibara's hand-printed editions: each impression was pulled by him personally rather than produced through a Japanese publisher's workshop, which is part of what places his prints inside the London Japanese woodblock tradition rather than the shin-hanga commercial system back in Tokyo. The Cyclamen print is held by the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, a Canadian institution whose Asian and Anglo-Japanese print holdings include several Urushibara flower studies, and its image record is preserved on ukiyo-e.org. Flower subjects like this one were sold widely through London exhibitions and were among the most accessible entry points for early collectors of Urushibara's work, demonstrating how he translated the kacho-e bird-and-flower lineage of Japanese printmaking into a format that fit comfortably on Edwardian and interwar British walls.