尾形月耕 • アイリスの庭 • 花にたとえられる美人 • 日本の木版画 - Japan - Meiji period (1868-1912)

** A Meiji Masterpiece Series of Restraint and Technique **

Ogata Gekkō (尾形月耕)
Iris Garden
From Bijin Hana Kurabe (美人花競) — Beauties Compared to Flowers

Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga), polychrome (nishiki-e)
Date: Meiji period, c. 1896–1897
Publisher: Matsuki Heikichi (松木平吉)
Format: Ōban tate-e, approx. 36.7 × 25 cm (14.4 × 9.8 inches)
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Condition Report

Impression & Colours: Excellent. A fine, richly coloured impression with beautifully saturated pigments throughout.

Paper: Very good. Full sheet with all four margins intact, including the series cartouche at upper right and the complete publisher's colophon with date (Meiji 29, February 10) at lower left. Light, even toning consistent with age. Minor crease. Some minor residue of backing on the verso.
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The Series — A Meiji Masterpiece of Restraint and Technique

Bijin Hana Kurabe ("Beauties Compared to Flowers") is one of the great unsung series of late Meiji printmaking. Comprising 24 ōban designs and issued over more than a decade between 1887 and 1899, each print pairs a beautiful woman with a specific flower or flowering plant: plum, cherry, iris, chrysanthemum, peony, wisteria, camellia, willow. The standard Japanese convention of mitate (parallel comparison) governs the conceit, but Gekkō pushes the form into territory that no earlier ukiyo-e bijin artist had explored.

What sets the series apart from every contemporary bijin-ga project of the 1880s and 1890s is its extraordinary restraint. The decade was dominated, in print terms, by the brilliant aniline-red triptychs of Chikanobu, Kunichika, and Yōshū Chikanobu — vivid, theatrical, saturated with the new imported European pigments. Gekkō went deliberately in the opposite direction. He chose the muted palette of pale washi: warm creams, soft greys, dove-coloured shadows, occasional accents of indigo or ochre, allowing the natural tone of the paper itself to function as a third or fourth colour in the design. The effect is that of a watercolour painting rather than a printed image, and the comparison is deliberate — Gekkō trained as a painter first.

The technical production of the series matches its visual ambition. The publisher commissioned exceptional craftsmanship: extensive bokashi gradation in skies and grounds, delicate karazuri (blind printing) for subtle textural relief, mica and metallic pigments in moons and lanterns, and a wide and unusual palette of mineral colours rather than the cheaper aniline dyes. Each print was carved from a dozen or more blocks. Sets were also issued in concertina album form, but the visual ambition of the series is most fully appreciated in individual sheets like this one, where the design occupies the centre of attention rather than competing with twenty-three siblings on facing pages.

The result is a body of work that feels much closer in spirit to the shin-hanga movement of the 1910s and 1920s — to artists like Shinsui, Goyō, and Hashiguchi — than to the late Edo ukiyo-e of Gekkō's own generation. In retrospect, Bijin Hana Kurabe can be read as one of the bridges between the old world of woodblock printing and the new: a transitional masterpiece designed in 1887–1899 that already speaks the visual language of the twentieth century.
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Ogata Gekkō — The Self-Taught Master of the Meiji Era

Ogata Gekkō (1859–1920) is one of the most remarkable figures of Meiji-period art, and one of the most underappreciated by Western collectors. Born in the Kyōbashi district of Edo to a family that had fallen on hard times, he received no formal artistic training whatsoever — a fact that makes his subsequent career all the more extraordinary. He began by decorating porcelain and painting designs on rickshaws, before taking up newspaper illustration and book design. His self-taught talent was such that around 1881 a descendant of the great Rinpa-school painter Ogata Kōrin invited him to assume the Ogata surname — a recognition of artistic kinship rather than a familial inheritance.

By the 1890s Gekkō had become one of the most sought-after print designers in Japan. He was the first ukiyo-e artist to be recognised by the official Western-style art establishment, exhibiting at the Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai (National Industrial Exhibition) and being elected a member of the Imperial Art Committee. His subjects ranged across the full breadth of late nineteenth-century life: warriors and historical episodes, the great victories of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 (his war triptychs are now classic), classical literature, theatre, and — in his quietest and perhaps finest mode — the beautiful women of the Bijin Hana Kurabe series.

His work is held in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the British Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and major Japanese collections. Gekkō died in 1920, just as the shin-hanga movement he had quietly prefigured was about to flower.