Autumn Flowers

The restricted palette used here is expanded by the trademark School of Kōrin tarashikomi technique, which creates subtle tension between the lucidity of the ink base and the filmy opacity of the white pigment dripped into it while still wet. Leaves are abstracted into dreamlike silhouettes, punctuated on a diagonal axis by orange trumpet creeper blooms, red tiger lilies, white fleabane, and yellow gourd flowers. This mediated inkwork recalls certain works by Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716), but perhaps owes more to the flora that his predecessor Tawaraya Sōtatsu (active c. 1600–1640) cultivated in large-scale folding-screen paintings like those displayed nearby.