Sei Shōnagon - Snow, Moon and Flowers - Japanese Woodblock Print - Ukiyo-e - Toyohara Yoshu Chikanobu (1838-1912) - Japan - Meiji period (1868-1912)

** Sei Shōnagon · Heian Court · The Pillow Book · Plum Blossoms · Jūnihitoe **

Artist: Toyohara (Yōshū) Chikanobu (楊洲周延, 1838–1912)
Title: Hana — Yamashiro — Umetsubo no Hana, Sei Shōnagon (花 山城 梅壺乃花 清少納言) — "Flower: Yamashiro Province — Flowers of the Plum Pavilion, Sei Shōnagon"
Series: Setsugekka (雪月花, Snow, Moon and Flowers)
Publisher: Kobayashi Tetsujirō (小林鉄次郎)
Date: 1885 (Meiji 18)
Technique: Woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and colour on paper
Format: Ōban tate-e, approx. 36 × 24 cm
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Condition: Excellent impression with vivid, well-preserved colours. Strong, saturated crimson tones throughout. Please refer to images for full details.
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About the print:

This is one of the most refined and literarily resonant "Flower" designs in the Setsugekka series, depicting Sei Shōnagon (清少納言, c. 966–c. 1025) — the celebrated Heian court lady and author of the Makura no Sōshi (The Pillow Book) — seated in contemplation at the Umetsubo (梅壺), the Plum Pavilion of the Imperial Palace in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Yamashiro Province.

In the main panel, Sei Shōnagon reclines on a broad veranda in the full splendour of Heian court dress. Her layered jūnihitoe robes cascade around her in sweeping folds — a deep green outer robe with all-over floral roundels (chrysanthemum and butterfly brocade), worn over vivid crimson and finished with richly patterned inner layers in blue, gold, and violet. Her long, unbound black hair, the hallmark of Heian feminine beauty, flows past her waist and pools against the floor. She gazes outward through hanging bamboo blinds (sudare) adorned with turquoise diamond patterning and tasselled cords, beyond which the branches of plum trees — the ume that give the Umetsubo its name — are visible in delicate silhouette against a twilight sky. Wooden railings and stepped flooring establish the elevated palace architecture, while at right a purple curtain edged with auspicious cloud motifs in blue and white creates a sense of the partitioned interiors characteristic of Heian palatial life.

The upper-left inset depicts the instruments of Sei Shōnagon's literary world: a low writing desk (bundai) bearing a handscroll unfurled to reveal calligraphy, a colourful folding fan, and what appears to be an inkstone box — the intimate tools of the woman whose diary would become one of the founding masterpieces of Japanese prose. The inset is enclosed in a green-bordered frame, its still-life composition a quiet counterpart to the contemplative figure below.

The choice of the Umetsubo — the Plum Pavilion, one of the named residences of imperial consorts within the inner palace (dairi) — as the setting is both geographically and symbolically apt. Sei Shōnagon served Empress Teishi (Sadako, 977–1001) during the height of the Heian court's literary golden age, an era that also produced her great rival Murasaki Shikibu and the Tale of Genji. The plum blossom, harbinger of spring and a perennial symbol of refinement in Heian poetry, serves as the "flower" element of the Setsugekka triad, anchoring this design in its seasonal role. That Chikanobu chose Sei Shōnagon — whose Pillow Book opens with a famous meditation on the beauty of each season — as the vehicle for the spring-flower subject makes for a particularly fitting pairing of figure and theme.
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About the Setsugekka series:

The Setsugekka series, published between 1884 and 1886 by the prestigious publisher Kobayashi Tetsujirō, comprises fifty individual ōban prints. Its title derives from an ancient Chinese poetic motif associating snow, moon and flowers with the seasons, but the true subject of the series is a sweeping panorama of Japanese history, mythology and literature — from court tales and Noh drama to warrior legends and supernatural folklore. The thematic range is extraordinary: across fifty designs, Chikanobu moves from Heian-era romance to Sengoku battlefield drama, from Chinese legend to the ghost stories of Edo, treating each subject with a distinctive compositional approach and mood. In this respect, the Setsugekka stands alongside Yoshitoshi's Tsuki Hyakushi (One Hundred Aspects of the Moon) as one of the great narrative series of the late nineteenth century, and the two are regularly compared by scholars and collectors alike.

What sets the Setsugekka apart visually is the richness and durability of its pigments. Spectroscopic research published in Heritage Science has demonstrated that the dominant red pigment in nishiki-e prints of this precise period (1884–1886) was not aniline dye — as is commonly assumed for Meiji prints — but cochineal carmine, a lake pigment formed from carminic acid precipitated with aluminium salts into an insoluble compound, typically mixed with vermilion (mercuric sulfide), a wholly inorganic mineral pigment. This carmine-vermilion combination produces the deep, saturated crimsons visible in the present print and accounts for their remarkable resistance to fading and water damage — a stark contrast to the fugitive naphthol reds that would appear in cheaper prints only after 1889. Combined with Kobayashi Tetsujirō's premium production standards — thicker pigment applications, high-quality paper, and deluxe printing techniques including fine bokashi and occasional metallic accents — the Setsugekka prints have retained their chromatic intensity with astonishing fidelity over nearly a century and a half.