Spring Rain Collection (Harusame shū), vol. 3: Mountain Dove and Peach Flowers

Teisai Hokuba

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Surimono are privately published woodblock prints, usually commissioned by individual poets or poetry groups as a form of New Year’s greeting card. The poems, most commonly kyōka (witty thirty-one syllable verse), inscribed on the prints usually include felicitous imagery connected with spring, which in the lunar calendar begins on the first day of the first month. Themes of surimono are often erudite, frequently alluding to Japanese literary classics in both texts and images.All four compositions on these leaves (JP2362–2365) come from the same set of prints, Six Bird-and-flower Prints for Utsunomiya in Shimotsuke Province (Kachō rokuban no uchi, Shimotsuke Utsunomiya). The series was commissioned by a branch of the Asakusa kyōka poetry group based in the city of Utsunomiya, north of Edo (present-day Tokyo). The artist Teisai Hokuba, an early pupil of the great ukiyo-e master Katsushika Hokusai, was best known as a painter, but also occasionally created deluxe surimono commissions. Here, he demonstrated how painterly effects could be accomplished in the medium of woodblock printing by eliminating outlines and employing subtle use of gradated ink tones (accomplished by manual wiping the printing blocks).

Asian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world. Each of the many civilizations of Asia is represented by outstanding works, providing an unrivaled experience of the artistic traditions of nearly half the world.

Metropolitan Museum of Art