KIYOCHIKA . Plum Garden at Kameido . Kōsen-ga Tokyo Series Japanese Woodblock Print . Ukiyo-e - Japan - Meiji period (1868-1912)

** THE PLUM GARDEN VAN GOGH COPIED — KIYOCHIKA'S KAMEIDO UMEYASHIKI, 22 YEARS AFTER HIROSHIGE **

Artist: Kobayashi Kiyochika (小林清親, 1847–1915)
Title: Kameido Umeyashiki (亀戸梅屋舗), Plum Garden at Kameido
Series: Untitled series of famous places of Tokyo (the celebrated kōsen-ga "light-ray picture" views, 1876–1881)

Technique: Nishiki-e woodblock print (mokuhanga); ink and colour on paper
Date: Meiji 13 (1880)
Publisher: Fukuda Kumajirō (福田熊次郎), Hasegawa-chō, Tokyo
Format: Ōban yoko-e, approx. 36 × 24 cm
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Condition

Excellent impression and colour throughout. The colours remain vivid and well-saturated.

The paper is firm and unbacked. There is minor trimming to the sheet, and a vertical fold line at centre. This centrefold is characteristic of the series as a whole: the horizontal ōban sheets of the Tōkyō Meisho Zu were very commonly folded and bound into album form shortly after publication, and its presence here should be read as typical of surviving impressions rather than as a condition fault. Overall a fresh, well-preserved sheet.
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The Scene

Kameido Umeyashiki, the "Plum Estate" in Kameido east of the Sumida River, was the most celebrated plum garden in Edo. The grounds covered about 11,800 square metres and held close to three hundred plum trees. The most famous of them was the Garyūbai, the "Sleeping Dragon Plum". Its low branches dipped into the soil and rose again as new trunks, so the tree kept renewing itself and eventually spread over some fifty feet square. Every early spring, when the plums bloomed, crowds came out from the city to see it. Kiyochika shows the garden in exactly that season: a tea stall crowded with visitors enjoying the blossoms.

The garden did not survive into the 20th century. In 1910 a great flood killed the Sleeping Dragon Plum, and the estate disappeared. As Tokyo grew, Kameido became one of its most heavily industrial districts.
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The Van Gogh Connection

In the eleventh month of 1857, Utagawa Hiroshige published his view of this same garden as no. 30 of One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Vincent van Gogh owned a copy. In 1887 he painted it in oil as Flowering Plum Orchard (after Hiroshige), one of the best-known examples of Japanese prints shaping European painting.

Kiyochika returned to the garden twenty-two years later. Hiroshige had shown the old tree up close through its branches. Kiyochika shows the garden as it looked in the early Meiji years, as a place people went to spend a spring afternoon. Together, the two prints record the site before and after the fall of the shogunate.
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About the Series

Between 1876 and 1881, Kiyochika produced a series of around ninety views of Tokyo for the publishers Matsuki Heikichi and Fukuda Kumajirō — the so-called kōsen-ga, or "light-ray pictures." Abandoning the bold outlines and flat colour of the Utagawa tradition, Kiyochika studied the effects of dawn light, dusk, gaslight, fire and shadow with an almost photographic naturalism, capturing a city suspended between old Edo and the rapidly Westernizing Meiji capital. The series ended abruptly when Kiyochika's own house burned in the Great Fire of Ryōgoku in 1881, but its influence far outlasted it: the atmospheric light effects pioneered here were carried directly into the twentieth century by his pupils, notably Tsuchiya Kōitsu, and provided the essential technical and aesthetic foundation on which the shin hanga landscape masters — above all Kawase Hasui — built. Kiyochika is justly called the father of the modern Japanese landscape print, and these Tokyo views are the works on which that reputation rests. They are keenly sought by collectors of both Meiji ukiyo-e and shin hanga.